


We Lost the Rulebook

by midrashic



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Banter, Board Games, Christmas Eve, Christmas Fluff, Christmas Party, Christmas Presents, Dorks, Fluff, Fluff and Smut, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, M/M, Post-SPECTRE, Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:41:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 21,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21773869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midrashic/pseuds/midrashic
Summary: How James Bond won the heart of his quartermaster through a judicious application of spycraft, subliminal messaging, and cooperative board games.AKA the board game Christmas fic.
Relationships: James Bond/Q
Comments: 211
Kudos: 604





	1. Romance: Hard Mode

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is made possible by the inimitable [Cas](https://castillon02.tumblr.com), whose keen editorial eye and sounding board chops have rescued me from many a quagmire, and by viewers like you. Thanks also to Bella, a peerless writing companion who adds +5 to brainstorming every time she opens her mouth.
> 
> Happy 2019 to the fandom. The world this year has been even more dismal than the last's, so instead of kidnapping and torturing Q, I went in the other direction. Enjoy, my lovelies. 💕

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –

It started like this:

“Camille,” Bond said brightly. “Listen, I need you to do me a favour.”

– ♠ –

Actually, it started like this:

On an op of 004’s that ran late into the night that Bond was present for because it was his informant she was rescuing, Bond walked into the situation room, found it empty, walked out, and paused because he thought he heard something coming from under the large holo-map table.

He looked again and saw Tanner—or, at least, Tanner’s suit trousers—sticking out from under the table like a nearsighted nerd hunting for his glasses, a sight he was passingly familiar with, given the amount of time he spent in Q-branch nowadays. If he craned his head, he could see the curly tip of Q’s mop of hair on the other side of the table, suggesting that he was in much the same position. Moneypenny, kneeling daintily in her emerald-green dress, was poised between them. “Lose the agent?” Bond asked dubiously. “I doubt you’ll find her down there.” 

Tanner jumped and narrowly avoided hitting his head on the underside of the table by yanking himself back and up simultaneously. Moneypenny grinned sweetly at him. Q peeked up until one dark-framed eye was peering at him across the table, which, now that Bond was looking more closely, was powered off and covered in Chinese takeaway boxes, a half-empty six-pack of beer, and colourful… game pieces?

“Oh, hello, Bond,” Q said. “Ayala is standing by and we’re playing Elder Horrors. Want some lo mein?”

Bond’s first professional instinct was to make a vague but insinuating remark that would leave them wondering whether he required sustenance at all, but he was trying to fix that about himself. “Sure,” he said, and sat down curiously, moving a plastic thing of shrimp lo mein closer as they all resumed searching for whatever it was they were looking for.

“Ha,” Tanner declared at last, and triumphantly held up a simple black die. 

Moneypenny clapped her hands together. “Excellent. So it’s my turn, then?”

Over a spare set of chopsticks—the place in Lambeth always sent at least twice as many sets of disposable chopsticks as there were entrées—and a mouthful of egg noodles which were the exact level of greasy necessary to keep you awake at two in the morning, Bond observed as they resumed play of a game which seemed to live somewhere in between the battered old copy of Monopoly Felix had found in a safe house’s closet once, which they’d played forty-nine times before the rogue physicist they’d been tracking had shown up and allowed himself to be shot in the head, and the Dungeons & Dragons thing he had been vaguely aware of as a teenager and had now experienced a resurgence in recent years. There was a story going on—something Lovecraftian, there was an “Ancient One” on the verge of awakening and an elaborate series of torments and trials their cardboard-profile characters needed to endure to stop it.

The goal of the game seemed to be a complicated combination of token-gathering and dice-rolling; dice were rolled to get the tokens which were traded in for other tokens for cards that would eventually stop some Lovecraftian horror from devouring the world. Q played a scowling female psychic, Moneypenny a melancholy actress, and Tanner a scarred Indiana Jones type. It was all very… messy. But strangely charming to see his—well, his friends gripe and strategise and fixate so fiercely on something that was so far away from their actual lives it came back around to being life-or-death again.

After a pitched battle with what Q reliably informed him was a moderately nasty monster in the Heart of Africa that dragged out over three rounds and left him clinging to health and sanity, Tanner overreached himself by plunging straight into an expedition. He made it through the first hurdle and did something to the ominous countdown timer at the top of the board that made Moneypenny and Q cheer, but at the second test of his skills, he faltered and wound up with amnesia.

“Ah, well,” Q said cheerfully. “Happens to the best of us.”

“Is this a game or a telenovela?” Bond asked.

“Oh, please,” Q said. “Like you haven’t woken up after a head wound thinking that you actually _were_ your cover of an international arms smuggler.” Bond shut up.

As the wee hours unspooled, Moneypenny sold her soul to get rid of a card preventing gates from being closed. Q, biting his lip, pitted his frail psychic against a wild beast and then whooped when his single die gave him the result he needed. Tanner sojourned to where a lonely cardboard character stand had been knocked onto its side—apparently Moneypenny’s former character, a reformed cultist who’d perished while dealing with an angry mob (”That whole encounter was a mistake from start to finish,” she’d sighed). As they raced to uncover the true name of the Ancient One, they came to a point where gate tokens lay across nearly every major setting. “No,” Moneypenny said when Tanner made noises about resting. “You need to close the Rome gate. If the next card tells us to spawn a gate and we can’t because we’ve run out of gate tokens, we’re screwed.”

“But Moneypenny,” Tanner said, pausing for dramatic effect, “I’ll die.”

“It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.” Q, on the other side of the board in Antarctica, would be no help—Bond gathered that this game was set pre-air travel. He snickered as he dissected a spring roll with a pair of chopsticks, watching Moneypenny’s ruthless bullying of Tanner with quiet glee. “Do you want to save the damn world from Shub-Niggurath or what?” she said unsympathetically.

“Just gauging whether it bothers you at all that you’re sending an amnesic debt-ridden paranoiac to his death,” Tanner sighed. His character evidently had not had an easy go of it. True to form, he rolled to seal the gate and got devoured.

“Respawn!” Q and Moneypenny cheered. Tanner stuck his hand into the bag of unused characters and pulled out a blond smirking woman. Tanner aimed an unsettlingly similar smirk in James’s direction; he already suspected he wasn’t going to like where this was going. “Trish Scarborough,” he reported. Moneypenny cackled; Q’s composure cracked as he grinned. “The spy. The _blond_ spy,” he added, in case that had been too subtle. In a poor Scottish accent, he read, “’Everyone expected great things from Trish when she was young. In school, she excelled in athletics and the sciences, but she surprised everyone after graduation by settling into a humble position at a commercial code company. What almost no one knows is that this particular company is a front for the Bureau’s code-breaking agency, the Black Chamber. Now she finds herself in the city of Krasnoyarsk meeting another agent who has important information about an impending threat from a world beyond our own.’”

“Krasnoyarsk is lovely this time of Armageddon,” James deadpanned.

Moneypenny laughed a 3AM laugh. She leaned over to peruse the character card and tutted. “Given the givens, it’s too bad Ms. Bond’s stats are terrible.” James scowled, irrationally offended on Trish’s behalf. 

“We’re about to be eaten by an Elder God, Penny,” Q said cheerfully. “Teaming up at the last minute with someone functionally useless because your ally just died seems perfectly in line with our luck so far.” 

Bond watched with scepticism turned begrudging interest—not so much in the game itself, he’d read Lovecraft in school and not liked it very much and found the idea of unimaginable alien horrors in general the domain of those too lazy to come up with something properly frightening, but in the way Q sparkled with intensity as he tapped his fingers on his lips, deciding which actions to take, just like he did when he was coding or hacking or guiding Bond through his own maze of horrors; in the way Q’s voice deepened as he read aloud—declaimed, really—the flavor text on his cards. It was a new experience—and one brimming with potential.

One of Q's best aspects was also a quality which made him nigh-impossible to properly court: his entire life, like Bond’s, was his work. As far as Bond had been able to tell up to that point, Q spent his off-hours tinkering with future gadgets that weren’t yet developed enough to justify dedicated office time; the closest he got to leisure reading was voracious consumption of the world news and technical and scientific journals. It made them, Bond dared to think, well-suited for each other; but it also meant that conversations inevitably devolved into shop talk, which was of limited romantic potential, no matter how wry or sly their back-and-forth over their “industry news” became.

But this—this was promising. This was a _hobby_ , an opening, something Bond could ruthlessly exploit to reframe himself as someone who might fit with Q outside of the ten to sixteen hours a day Q spent at the office. This was a handhold into Q’s life, such as it was, outside of MI6. This was the answer.

The world did get devoured by Shub-Niggurath; a final confrontation between a horde of monsters and their plucky protagonists ended with two of them insane and one of them maimed. But Bond was already calculating, sorting out what he knew and what he needed to learn in his head. By the time Ayala reported in, tired but unharassed, that the asset had been secured, he had the beginnings of a plan.

Not a very good plan. But a plan indeed.

– ♠ –

But really, it started like this:

Three months after he’d quit MI6 (again), he’d come back with his tail between his legs (again) and braced himself to swallow the bitter amusement with which he’d been greeted after the last time he tried to retire. And he hadn’t found any.

Moneypenny had said, crisp and amused as ever, “Back to darkening our doorways again, James?” and M had barely looked at him before he’d told him to report to Tanner for pre-mission evaluations and Tanner had… well, been himself. (Nothing would change that man; not even the loss of the previous M had flapped his unflappable exterior for very long, he’d taken off two days as soon as the clean-up of Skyfall was well in hand by his lackeys and come back exactly the same, down to the deferential respect he’d immediately granted the old woman’s successor.) His fellow double-ohs gave him the same mixture of impressed envy that he’d overturned the entire SIS again and intense annoyance that he’d fucked off and let them deal with the fallout _again_ they always did. Only Trevelyan had said, “All right, James?” with the faintest glimmer of doubt that he was the exact same person who’d trashed Mexico City just months before, and Alec was one of his best and oldest friends.

It was strange; Bond found himself checking the calendar too often, reassuring himself that he really had been gone for months and not days, like everyone seemed to feel he had been.

“Oh,” Q had said when he’d asked. It was always Q he asked; he was a big believer in efficiency, and Q always had the answer. It had taken days to track him down this time, and he finally caught him heading out of work. They walked out together as he said, “I put in the system that you’d gone off without leave again. Everyone just assumed that M wanted you out of sight, even M, I think. In case you wanted to come back… I thought you might not want people knowing that for a time you hadn’t wanted to be here.”

“But you knew I was gone,” Bond said, puzzled. “You gave me the car.”

“First of all,” Q sniffed, “I did not _give_ you the car, you cajoled it out of me with your… things and your… _thinginess_. Second of all,” he barrelled on before Bond could do more than silently mouth _thinginess?_ , “I’ve gotten used to absolutes being temporary states with you. Either you’d come back, and you’d be glad no one noticed you left, or you wouldn’t, and eventually we’d get around to hiring a new 007. No harm done.”

“But _why?”_ Bond pressed. There was something else there, some bubble of tension he needed to pop floating on the surface of his mind. “Why would it even matter to you? I’m—I _am_ grateful, Q. I just don’t understand why you’d do it.”

At the Tube station, Q tapped his Oyster card and waited, amused, while Bond dug around in his wallet stuffed full of foreign currency for his own. Q’s train was pulling in just as they stepped onto the platform. Bond followed him on, feeling rather like a confused stray. As he grabbed a strap to steady himself, Q told him, “You can always come home, you know. I know you’re not used to it. There’s no reason you would be. But now you know. You can always come back here. To this.” He inclined his head around and Bond knew he didn’t just mean MI6, but all of it, every scuffed inch of Q’s London, which he was offering to Bond like it was his to give. He grinned, crooked and warm and some hard and cold part of Bond ached with the melting fondness of his smile. “That’s why I gave you the car, you know. You’re my agent, no matter how contrary you’re being. I keep you safe… _in style._ ”

True to form, Bond fell in love with Q on a train.

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –


	2. Bond's Meeple

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –

The week after 004’s triumphant return with one very shaken Ukrainian biophysicist in tow, Camille called to tell him that according to FedEx, her first gift—well, he said gift, she said evidence of her grudging investment in the ongoing saga of Q and Bond that he’s been relating to her on a bimonthly basis—should be waiting with Bond’s post when he got home. Camille was the ideal co-conspirator, young and discreet and, most importantly, the woman who had instituted a twice-monthly combined game-trivia night for her Bolivian Multipurpose Intervention Brigade team four years ago as a team-building exercise. By all accounts, it worked better than the stuffy holiday parties MI6 was inclined toward. 

“Why can’t you ask him out like a normal person?” she said again, as he briskly evaluated the plain brown atlas-sized box for explosives or potential biological hazards.

“He’s not a normal person,” Bond explained patiently.

“I meant you.”

“I’m not a normal person either. Besides, he’s seen my _normal_ methods in action too often to be impressed by now. Along with Felix, Alec, Moneypenny, and you, he’s probably one of the five people in the world I couldn’t seduce if I tried.”

“Perhaps,” Camille said dryly, “your techniques simply aren’t as good as you think they are.”

Bond made an offended noise in the back of his throat. After they’d agreed to bet the next year’s worth of drinks on a showdown the next time both of them were in the field after the same target, Bond steered the conversation back to the truly important subject with, “Did you get the encrypted satcam I sent you?”

“Yes. If your Q is as good as you say he is, we won’t have to worry about either enemy spies or allies getting wind of the idiocy you’re capable of talking me into.”

“Except for him,” Bond sighed. “I’ve disabled the backdoor access Q puts into all his cameras, but he’d still probably be able to hack the encrypted signal manually. He probably won’t be paying attention to the odd activity as long as we keep our meetings irregular and maintain our usual electronic trails.”

“If you put this much effort into your missions you wouldn’t be banned from Bangladesh,” Camille said disapprovingly. “All right, Bond, boot up the camera. We have three hours to teach you how to play this game so you don’t look like a total idiot in front of your boy.”

– ♠ –

“…Bond?” Q sounded baffled. A black cat with white-socked feet, looking equally confused, peered out from between Q’s own feet, clad in eye-popping orange. “How do you know where I live?”

“You shouldn’t take the Tube home as often as you do,” Bond informed him. “It’s like you’re begging for an assassin to follow you home.”

“Have _you_ been following me home?” Q asked, a little shrill.

Right. That probably wasn’t something normal people who were trying to court lovely, fiercely brilliant workaholics did. “…No,” he said. He thrust the game into Q’s arms. It was a slim cardboard box, about the size of a large book, and it had artwork of serious-looking scientists huddled around a test tube printed on top.

“Affliction? You brought me… a board game?” Q said. He didn’t look any less lost, nor was the door opening any more than the hand-width crack through which he’d accepted the box. This was going poorly. “Is this about the Djibouti thing?”

“No. Yes,” he amended as he realised his four days stumbling through the Horn of Africa trying to get out of range of a terrorist group’s super-communications interceptor was the perfect excuse he’d been waiting to have drop into his lap. “What happened on that op got me thinking that perhaps we’re too reliant on traditional electronic methods of encryption. Any of the old spycraft tricks—dead drops or a canary trap—might have easily gotten around their tech, but it would have to be prearranged with other agents in advance. My friend in the Bolivian BIP has been playing around with board games as a potential tool of encoding information… I told her I knew someone who might be able to help.” Q was staring at him. “That’s you,” Bond added self-consciously.

“You want me,” Q said, “to help you go back to the espionage equivalent of the Stone Age.”

“Be fair,” Bond muttered. “We’re talking about at least the Iron Age of intelligence-gathering. And no. I want you to help me update the best parts of classical tradecraft for a new world. To turn this old bag of tricks into something that works with and around electronic surveillance, not buried beneath it.” Something sweet and warm was dawning on Q’s face. Bond shuffled on his feet, quite unsure what to do with that look being aimed at him. “I thought I’d be a fool not to ask you, given the amount of damage you’re capable of in your pyjamas with all these new toys. And I do try not to be a fool.”

“All right,” Q said. He held open the door for Bond. The cat mewed at him doubtfully.

Once he was inside, Bond knew he was barking up the right tree. Q’s interior decorating tastes seemed to come in two styles: digital hoarding and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with books, little knitted animal figurines… and board games.

“Mr. Turing,” Q introduced him to the curious black-and-white furball which had followed them in. “Mr Turner’s probably trying to eat a dust bunny under my bed.”

“Turing and Turner?” Bond asked, amused.

“Turing after Alan, father of computer science and artificial intelligence. Turner after Alan, the le Carré character.”

Bond smiled a tiny bit. He remembered finding _A Small Town in Germany_ , about a gruff foreign office operative investigating a disappearance at a German embassy that turned out to be connected to World War II atrocities, packed among his things on a mission to Bonn that had been early in his career with Q. “Do you read a lot of spy novels?”

“Ha, who has the time? And the inaccuracies bother me now. But I have a soft spot for le Carré. Don’t laugh!—but I joined the Service because of his books.”

Bond valiantly held in the chuckle that wanted to escape. “The everyman hero whose quiet brilliance unravels intricate plots?”

“Don’t smirk at me either, I know your secrets. No one joins MI6 without a bit of romance in their hearts. I suppose it was the explosions, guns, women, Robert Ludlum thriller stuff that appealed to you.”

“Actually,” Bond said, “le Carré is one of my favourite writers. Sometimes it’s nice to believe that quiet thought can unravel conspiracies.” Q looked at him, startled. “I’ve only read the Smiley novels, though. And,” he inclined his head, “ _A Small Town in Germany.”_

Q dimpled. “It’s my favourite,” he confessed.

“That’s terribly cynical of you,” Bond said, amused.

“It’s a cautionary tale about the nature of our work. The ‘dream box’… it’s a reminder that we must be better than the cyclical tendency of our humanity.”

“Is that what you gathered from the massive Nazi rally ending the book?” Bond asked.

Q smiled. “It did make you think, when you were in Bonn, didn’t it?” Bond inclined his head. It had certainly been an _interesting_ read before a mission spent hunting down a new, militant group of Pan-European Nazis who had been planning to stage a massive attack on their own rally to portray themselves as victims of a creeping Muslim/Jewish/whatever network of foppish internationalists.

“So—you brought me a board game so we could work together to avoid the mistakes of establishment spies everywhere: lack of innovation?”

“When you put it like that, I sound positively clever.”

“Okay, Bond,” Q said. “Sit down. Let’s play.”

– ♠ –

GAME NOTES 001: COOPERATION IS KEY. 

“We’ll start with Affliction,” Camille had said. “The travel logistics isn’t so different from the job, and if he likes board games, he probably has a copy; we’ll ease him into the idea of gaming with you.”

Which had sounded perfect, until a cascade of plagues had swept like a tsunami over the corner of the world Bond had been manning in their practice game. “Try not to do that in front of him,” Camille had advised, _like that was easy._

“Have you played before?” Q asked now, deftly unfolding the game board printed with a world map and shuffling and setting up little cube pockets of disease. Bond snuck a glance at the bookshelves; sure enough, without much effort he found an identical copy of the game crammed between a huge box entitled “Isles of Insanity: 2nd Edition” and a well-worn, fairly standard-size box that just read _7._

“No,” he lied baldly. “Before running into your little cadre of card-layers, I hadn’t taken a good look at a board game since… it must have been when I was still in the navy. A Czech version of Monopoly one of the men picked up in Prague that no one could read,” he added, more honestly.

“Monopoly doesn’t count,” Q sniffed. “Well, then. Affliction is one of the more famous games out there, and it’s generally considered the father of cooperative games—games where all the players work together and win or lose as a group. There are four diseases, for which I’m sure you’ll come up with disgusting and graphic names, and the goal is to cure, if not eradicate, all four before you become overrun by plague rats or what have you.”

He carried on explaining to Bond the rules that Camille had already laid out for him, and Bond nodded and hmmed in the right places, and then they played a game.

It was—surprisingly fun. Q played meticulously, with a tablet where he sketched out their next couple of turns in advance, telling Bond to use his special player power here and build a research station there, and Bond found the optimal moves coming more easily to him as the game went on. In an amusing little reversal, Q played a field medic, Bond a scientist, and if it was simple to tease Q about being the one who should be calling the shots, it came naturally to let Q guide him anyway, for Q to say, “Charter a flight to Mumbai,” and for James to unquestioningly discard the appropriate card and zoom around the map. They were battling to remove cubes of disease from an expanse spanning the entire globe, but the stakes were so much lower than even the most routine bioterrorism op.

When Bond disobeyed him and fucked off back to Atlanta, Q only laugh-sighed and said, “There is nothing about you that goes easy, is there?”

Bond twinkled at him. Q’s flat had blue-white fluorescent lights striping the ceiling, but right now Q was ensconced in a squashy red chair and backlit by a squashy yellow lamp, and outside it was raining (again) but inside it was all lovely company and his lovely laugh. Mr. Turing kneaded his claws into James’s lap and Bond rested his hand of cards on his fur as he petted between his ears. “That’s not what people usually say.”

Q laughed, bright and sharp as diamond, hard and warming as coal. “Of course not.”

They lost the first game but won the second, mostly thanks to Q’s manoeuvering and an ethically dubious decision to sacrifice Australia and Southeast Asia for the sake of snatching a last-minute cure out of the jaws of defeat.

“The deck,” Q mused as they packed up. “Now that’s an area of real potential. They’re all location cards—if you arranged them in a certain order, you could pass along key intelligence, perhaps the location of terrorist hubs scattered around the globe. Or if you needed to find out which facility of several had the information or project you were looking for, you might slip an Affliction card into another game—an honest mistake, these things happen all the time—” Which had, in fact, been one of the key pieces of intel Bond hadn’t been able to pass along in Djibouti.

“Montes is sending along another game in the next few days,” he told Q, who looked at him with wide, luminous eyes. “Can I… rely on you?”

Q smiled. “Bond—it would be my pleasure.”

Relief swept through him, along with a strange hot shimmer of surprise at his own words. Reliance on someone other than himself. What a novelty.

– ♠ –

GAME NOTES 002: VALUE IS RELATIVE.

The next time they met, it wasn’t just raining but full-blown storming. Rare lightning arced across the sky; they dashed into Q’s building. Q had given up entirely on the concept of dryness and simply clutched his laptop bag, wrapped in his anorak for waterproofing to his chest--why did he even _own_ that thing if he didn’t wear it when it was useful?--and Bond trying futilely to cover them both with one brolly. It was a good umbrella, but not that good. In Q’s flat, he parked Bond in front of the radiator and then went to drip affection and secondhand rain all over his offended cats, change, and make hot cider.

Luckily, this box was even smaller than the last. Q smiled as Bond pulled it out of his coat. “Saga: Spice World. Your friend’s not got bad taste.”

Camille had appalling taste in everything but fashion and now, apparently, board games. Bond smiled back.

They spent the evening alternately trading up and downgrading spices to match orders drawn from a deck in a deceptively simple mechanism that nevertheless had him sweating as he tried to keep up with Q’s seemingly effortless mental logistics. The turns went quickly, and there was more time to breathe, to talk about something other than the game and its rules this time. Again, he found himself enjoying it, and enjoying Q more. “When this is over,” he said, half out of genuine hope and half to distract Q away from the cardamom-to-saffron conversion card he was eyeing himself, “perhaps we could head out for a late bite. There’s this lovely little bistro a few blocks north…”

Q, unaffected, snatched the card away from him, ruining a strategy that had taken several turns to set up. Only then did he look at Bond with a keen assessor’s eye that made him want to squirm nearly as much as the former M’s had. “No,” he said at last, “I don’t think so. Busy day tomorrow. Got to be up early to outfit 008 and 002. I don’t usually have time for… social engagements, anyway.”

“But you do for board games.”

“Yes.” Q grinned at him and stole another card right out from under his nose.

“Why board games?” Bond at last indulged the mild curiosity that had accompanied this new facet of Q, which truthfully was a low-simmering curiosity about all of Q’s assorted eccentricities, quirks, and erogenous zones.

“Hm?”

Bond nodded at the shelves. There had to be nearly a hundred games crammed into various alcoves or serving double-duty as bookends. “I’d have thought you’d spend all your time—inventing, perhaps. Something small and fiddly, like the micro-receivers you assemble at work. Music. Glassblowing, perhaps.”

“I tried glassblowing once,” Q said unexpectedly. “It was nerve-wracking. Board games have a much smaller chance of ending up with someone on fire… not zero, though.” Bond laughed as he was clearly meant to, but he kept his eyes on Q, swapping spices and fulfilling orders almost on autopilot. “I don’t know. It’s just one of those things. Why do you make every single actual vacation you take a ski trip?”

“I learned to ski after my parents died,” Bond said. “It was the first thing I did after they passed that was actually… fun.”

Q blinked at him. Bond was rather taken aback at himself, having meant to invent a charming and possibly lewd story about the Navy.

In a strange, almost shy tone, Q said, “I was in care between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. I didn’t have a lot. When you move around so much, you’re encouraged to keep it down to one holdall and a backpack. Like on airplanes. No room or money for a laptop, so I spent most of my time at the library. …There was this board game club that met every Wednesday evening. I would watch them play. And one day I wandered inside, and none of them minded that I was nerdy and quiet, they were all nerdy and quiet too, and they taught me. Just like that.” He toyed with a cinnamon cube. He was smiling, but it was wistful. “The last year I was in the system, I brought an old copy of Settlers of Natac with me everywhere I went. When you’re locked in after curfew, it’s harder to turn up your nose at any kind of entertainment, so I made friends. And of course at the time I was hacking Children’s Services, aging myself up so I could get out of there a little sooner, working on a national scale, then international… but my skills were just… one more thing that set me apart, at least in my own mind, from all the others my age. Games did the opposite. For a while, I could feel… normal.” He huffed a self-deprecating laugh. “I still have that copy of Settlers, by the way. Strange thing to prize above all other possessions, I know. But there you have it.”

Bond thought of a chipped old porcelain bulldog lying on his liquor cabinet in a bare, blank apartment that was even sparser and less lived-in than Q’s and said nothing.

“It suits you,” he said at last. Q cocked his head, a half-smile on his lips. “The games, I mean. You look… lighter. Still like you want to eviscerate someone who fouled up your mission brief,” he added, “but almost as though you might enjoy it.” 

“I… do.” Q laid out the intimidating number of victory point-cards he’d collected over the course of the game. “Honestly, Bond,” he said laughingly, “there’s a time and a place to try and distract someone who’s trouncing you in a board game with your sexual wiles, and it’s not after you’ve already lost by thirty-two points. You can do better than that.”

Bond considered that—actually, he could. This courtship was—unusual to him, all soft edges and cardboard cutouts where he’d once had caviar and the sparkling fit of his suits, simpler and yet more fraught, but he could do better than a half-casual insinuation that was strategy as much as feeling. It fell into place starkly, as clear as a mission briefing, as the love he’d felt and lost, as clear as anything else in his life. As clear as breath: in, out. In. Out.

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –


	3. License to Roll

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –

GAME NOTES 003: PLEASE THE CATS.

“So the objective of this game,” Bond said slowly, “is to design a quilt. To attract as many cats as possible. Sorted by coziness. To your quilt. That you designed.”

“Yes,” Camille said heartlessly.

“I hate you,” Bond said.

– ♠ –

“Oh, your friend must have been a Kickstarter backer!” Q exclaimed. “I’ve been wanting to play Kalico for ages, but it’s not out yet for general release.”

Grudgingly, Bond admitted that Camille might actually be the better spy.

“Look,” Q said, bubbling over with satisfaction, “you select a quilt patch and assemble them into combinations, and certain combinations draw certain cats, and the cats are worth certain points based on cuddliness, but you can kind of tell by their art anyway—that one’s a snuggler, it’s plain as anything—”

Bond had a sudden vision of himself as a crotchety old cat man attempting to coax a wild-haired little black mog onto a quilt that was strongly patterned after board game boxes. He quickly packed that thought away into the crevice of his mind where things to never be looked at again lived.

“—and when you have three clumped together like that, you can sew a button onto the quilt, and that’s worth points—and if you complete certain patterns, you get bonuses—”

Bond gently laid his hands on Q’s wildly gesticulating own. “Perhaps,” he said, “you could teach me as we play.” Q beamed at him, more brilliant than Bond had ever seen him before, including when he’d brought down the Chinese firewall for fourteen whole minutes.

– ♠ –

Mr. Turner, probably offended by the cooing noises Q was making which were generally reserved for him and Mr. Turing, sauntered outside at one point to see what the fuss was about and made Bond’s acquaintance.

It did not go well.

At home later, as he disinfected the long, thin scratches running down his right cheekbone, Bond did a quick mental check to see whether he was still in love with this man. Against all odds, the answer seemed to be yes.

“Well, fuck,” he told his bathroom mirror.

– ♠ –

GAME NOTES 004: FIND THE RIGHT WORDS.

Word-based games! Bond had thought with relief. Surely here was one area in which he wouldn’t embarrass himself. He wasn’t a genius like Q, but he had nothing to be ashamed about when it came to the breadth of his vocabulary, which included a wide and varied selection of curse words from around the world. It turned out that espionage involved a lot of waiting, so it was good to become a book person for the in-between times, not to mention it improved the all-important language acquisition skills.

“It says that the person who last used a pen goes first,” Q said contemplatively.

Bond raised his eyebrows. “When was the last time you wrote something that wasn’t on a tablet with a stylus?”

“ _Stylus_ literally means ‘pen.’ I have to admit, your last use of a pen was… certainly memorable.”

Bond grinned at him. “Because it exploded.”

“Because it exploded _and brought down a city block_ ,” Q huffed. “Fine, go. You’ve been strutting like a peacock all through dinner, impress me.”

And Bond tried. But—

“Not in the dictionary,” Q sing-songed.

“It is the currency of Macedonia,” Bond said through gritted teeth. “It is the English spelling of the Macedonian currency. Do you know how I can tell it’s an English word, not a Macedonian one? Because _Macedonian uses Cyrillic writing._ ”

“It is not,” Q said with deep satisfaction, “a word according to youronlinedictionary.com, which _you_ , I might add, agreed in advance to use as our word bible. Try again.”

Grudgingly, Bond rearranged DENAR into DEAR, which was clearly English, but didn’t give him enough pennies to buy a new letter. Q cheerfully spread out his entire hand into PROLES and used his special power to force Bond to discard a letter. This was infuriating.

But because it made Q laugh, Bond began to play an invalid word—but still one that Q would recognise—at the beginning of each of his turns before making his actual move. SCHATZ, he tried. Then MERDE, FACADE (which Q contested on the grounds of youronlinedictionary.com listing the word with a cedilla), and APPLETINI. Each time, Q let out a bright, piercing giggle before he promptly pressed his fist into his mouth, which Bond liked to believe meant he was trying and failing to hide how utterly charming he found Bond’s antics.

Bond played SPOTS. Q’s smile grew pensive. In retaliation, he played SCRAP and then used his player power to leave a hole in Bond’s next word the size of a steamship, which was just too much to be coincidence. “This reminds me of something,” he said wryly.

“Does it?” Q asked, faux-innocent. ARCHAIC. Ouch. Q ended the game quickly and decisively soon after that, working briskly to maximise his points at the expense of the easy conversation Bond had grown used to over the past few weeks. Bond waited for him to sweep the board and set up for another game, but Q began to pack everything away.

“Are you… angry at me?” Bond hazarded. Christ, this was difficult. People were difficult. Give him a terrorist to shoot any day.

“No,” Q said. “I just thought—you probably have rather a lot of things to do—”

“Yes, which is why I came over to your flat to play board games all evening.” Astonishingly, this made Q flinch. He shoved the boxed-up game of Hardcover on the shelf where he’d been keeping everything Camille had sent after they were done with it.

“Well, _I_ have rather a lot to do—there are equipment damage reports that I need to sign off on, including for that bloody exploding pen, not to mention a prototype for interchangeable specialty magazines I’ve been working on for a while, so no need to humour me, Bond, the evening is yours to—do whatever it is you do when you’re not here—”

“Wait,” Bond said. Ugh, human connection. Was it truly worth it? He looked at Q’s bright, fierce eyes and sighed inwardly. “Q, what’s—I thought… you seemed like you were having a good time.”

Q studied him. “I was. Were _you_?”

“Of course,” Bond said, nonplussed. Q’s eager laugh when he’d played BAWBAG rang in his ears. “Why would I keep coming to you if I weren’t enjoying myself?”

“Because of the continuing strategic vulnerabilities we’ve found in each game you’ve brought to me,” Q said dryly.

Which—all right, if that _were_ actually his motive in bringing board games to Q like a cat with its dead catches, that might make sense. Unfortunately, he had no way of dissuading Q of this notion, so he probed deeper into the sentiment behind it. “Do you worry I haven’t been enjoying myself?”

Q puffed up, then deflated when Bond continued to gaze at him with utter confusion and concern. He rubbed a jumper-clad wrist over his eyes. “It’s nothing. Nothing. Christ, I’m tired. It was a long day today.”

Bond frowned, trying to remember. “The budget meeting?”

“Yes. No. I just—Fincher, from Accounting, you know him—”

“Toupee? Likes to golf? Arsehole?”

Q coughed out a laugh. “Yes, that’s the one. He said something about—me being promoted early—and I hear it all the time, and normally it doesn’t get to me—but it’s difficult, sometimes, seeing myself the way everyone else does. Including you.”

“The game reminded you of what I said, the first time we met,” Bond realised. “Q—you must know I don’t believe that anymore.”

“Why not?” Q curled in over himself, arms folded like he was trying to warm himself from a deep, internal chill. “It’s true, after all. I am young. Qualified, but still, M would almost certainly have chosen someone safer, someone with more experience, if she hadn’t been desperate after Silva’s attack on Vauxhall. I do still have spots. I—” he blew a lock out of hair out of his eyes, which made him look very young indeed— “play board games in my spare time. Don’t—don’t concern yourself over it, 007. Like I said, I hear it all the time. It just startled me, the reminder tonight. Don’t… think too much of it.”

“Q—I didn’t ask you for help with this because you’re young. I asked you because you’re brilliant, and—”

He hadn’t cut himself off fast enough. Q raised an eyebrow, looking terribly vulnerable in that moment. “And?”

“And because—when I saw you play with Moneypenny and Tanner—I thought, I’d like that. To be… friends.”

“Is that what we are?”

Bond swallowed. Friends, just friends—actually, it was the last thing he wanted for himself and Q. But. It was true, wasn’t it? Q might like him, might find him attractive and shaggable, but he didn’t _trust_ him, not really. _Do_ I _trust_ him? he asked himself, and though the easy answer might be _yes_ , the more accurate one might be _getting there._ He hadn’t trusted anyone in such a long time. He could trust Q with his life, absolutely, but his heart…

There was a space in between falling in love with someone and being _ready_ to love them, and Bond thought he was somewhere over it, suspended in midair, or walking an invisible bridge. He saw the other shore drawing closer every day, every time he sat down for one of these games, but it was still out of reach. For now.

Q needed to trust him more, and perhaps that went both ways. What was this if not an exercise in Bond trying to get around the necessity of trusting Q with the truth of his feelings?

“Yes. We’re friends,” he said at last, and Q smiled, tremulous but genuine, and pulled the game back out, and Bond, in a rare circumstance for him, was absolutely sure that he’d said the right thing.

– ♠ –

GAME NOTES 005: DON’T JUDGE A BOARD GAME BY ITS BOX.

The next few games came after a delay, but in quick succession; Camille had shipped one package from a safe house in Chiapas and her next one using Langley’s civilian post in between sessions of a joint CIA/BIP hearing, which put everything through multiple mail-bomb checks no matter whether the mail was incoming or outgoing. Enclosed was a very long letter complaining about “that _pendejo”_ and his chauvinistic neo-imperialist bullshit, which Bond eventually figured out referred to Felix, whom Camille had hated deeply, passionately, and lustfully since the two of them had _crossed paths_ on an op in Egypt. 

Bond brought the accompanying game box featuring cutesy art of woodland creatures to Q’s, slightly dreading the evening after the cat disaster of two weeks ago, but Q had only grinned, shark-like, and said, “Oh, you’ll like this.” He insisted on playing as the Marquis de Cat, which didn’t exactly inspire a great deal of confidence in Bond that this would turn out much better than the cat game, and snickered when he handed Bond the Eyrie Dynasty role. He knew that Q found it hilarious to bestow upon him the old-money, traditionalist ruling class while he played a kingdom focused on industry and technological advancement made up of the species he had as pets. The saccharine artwork, however, turned out to conceal a game rooted deeply in military strategy and supply chain management.

There was a story here—Bond’s faction had ruled the game board until a loss of power allowed Q’s faction to seize control—but what actually made it interesting was that unlike the games they’d played before, they each played by a different set of rules. Bond would win if he reconquered sections of the board; Q would win if he built enough structures to consolidate power. Bond had an additional complicating factor that meant he had to play an increasingly long series of cards in succession each turn, and if he was unable to complete the chain, there would be a revolt or uprising or some such happening that would lose him power; Q began by controlling eleven-twelfths of the board but had to constantly keep Bond’s strivings in check. There were cards to gain points in other ways and dice to battle with, and it went surprisingly quickly, and Q won the first game, but with a narrower margin than Bond was used to him winning.

“Brilliant, isn’t it?” Q said cheerfully. “Asymmetric is the term; each player is capable of different things, to a more substantial degree than just having a special power or two. ’Course, there’s a bit of a learning curve, it means you have to know the game fairly well, you can’t just crib your strategy from watching others—” at this, he gave Bond a fondly judgemental glance; Bond had indeed been skating by mainly on the strength of his mimicry— “but I like it. My favourite games are asymmetrical.”

“Oh, you have favourite games,” Bond teased. “I thought that for hobbyists, that was like having favourite children.”

“I have a favourite child,” Q sniffed. “Don’t tell Mr. Turner.”

After that was Island of the Spirits, wherein the players were mystical spirits determined to drive out an invading European force (out of national pride, Q had immediately chosen France as their antagonist, which Bond respected; he had never met a single likable DGSE agent in his many, many years liaising with them) and which Camille had also definitely sent as yet another jab toward US foreign policy. He and Q were again working together to defeat the game, which Bond, embarrassingly, felt was substantially more _right_ than working against each other. It was a board game, for God’s sake. And yet Q was as formidable and ruthless an opponent when he was laying quilt tiles to collect cats as when he was throwing the cybersecurity forces of the nation against those who would cause her harm.

Still, having Q by his side tempered him, not tamed him. “Admit it,” Q said, eyes sparkling, “you’ve been run off an island by locals waving pitchforks before, haven’t you? Admit it and I’ll use my Gift of Strength power to let you do that lovely lightning blast thing again.”

“This is blackmail.”

“Only if you want to win,” Q said cheerfully, which, damn him, he knew wasn’t a question at all. Bond, too, was hypercompetitive and took trivial things a little too seriously, like winning Q’s affections, not that Q knew that was the actual contest happening here.

Bond ignored him and decided to use a power that was less destructive but increased the ambient fear the colonists were feeling substantially. Q already knew far too much about Bond’s follies, which had been immortalised in the form of after-action reports; he hardly needed more ammunition in the form of all the things which hadn’t made it into the official record. “Islanders can be… insular,” he acknowledged. “It’s all the trade necessary to sustain the quality of life, I think; when everything you need is brought to you, why bother seeing what the tea and cardigans of the rest of the world look like?”

Q made a feline-sounding noise of indignation. “Was that a jab?”

“Maybe a little. Are you really afraid of flying?”

“I’m not _afraid,_ I just don’t see any reason to subject myself to it if there’s a reasonable alternative,” Q sniffed. “For example, when you blew up a city and then fucked off to chase ghosts, there was no reasonable alternative that wouldn’t result in my getting the sack, so I flew to Austria.”

“You live an hour from the rest of Europe, that’s not reason enough to brave commercial air once in a while?”

“I’ve travelled,” Q said defensively. “Studied abroad in Athens for a while and speak passable Greek, thank you very much.”

“You studied in Athens for their… cutting-edge technology programs?” Bond asked doubtfully. The last time he’d been in the halls of Greek government, they’d still been using Windows 95.

“Classical art and architecture,” Q corrected. His eyes crinkled at Bond’s expression, whatever that might have been. “I have interests outside computers, engineering, and keeping your sorry arse alive. Not many, granted, but a few.”

“Clearly,” Bond said, gesturing at the board stretched out between them and Q’s massive, imposing shelves. “Where else besides Greece?”

Q shrugged. A little colour tinted his cheeks. “Austria. For about a day.”

“You’ve… really never been anywhere else?” A thousand images flooded his mind: sun, sand, exotic foods, Q licking fresh dragonfruit juice off of his fingers, flashing a bright-eyed smile at Bond visible even through his sunglasses. God, Bond wanted to spoil this boy. “Not even by train? Never did the backpacking-across-Europe thing all the people of your generation seem to have done?”

“Until… very recently, I didn’t have the money. Now I’m the Quartermaster of the British Secret Service, and I don’t have the time.” He tapped his fingers on his cards and smiled a little uncomfortably. “I admit to having been a little envious my first few months on the job. You agents seemed to be able to go everywhere, see everything… of course, that only lasted until I had to book Agent Greene lodgings in a pigsty in western China.”

Bond barked a laugh, surprised at his own joy. “That was you? Christ, she still bitches about it whenever you get her drunk enough.”

“She’s alive to do it, isn’t she? It was the best way to avoid detection,” Q sniffed, but colour clung to his cheeks. He did a tricky little thing that would prevent the French invaders from spreading their blight and corruption everywhere this turn. They surveyed the board with satisfaction. “Say, Bond,” he said in a different tone of voice, “I’ve been thinking, something like Island of the Spirits might be ideal for our purposes, at least as a last-ditch failsafe when all other lines of communication have been compromised. It can be played by one person; set up a game in a safe house, abandon it with a steaming mug and some decoy information, and you have a way of communicating tactical information to the clean-up crew that seems perfectly innocuous to whatever enemy forces might come to investigate between your leaving and us arriving.”

“Assuming they don’t just blow up the whole building,” Bond said, trying to drag himself back on track. He didn’t want to go back to discussing this, his and Camille’s cover for why these nights existed at all; he wanted to tell Q all about his own favorite places in the world, coax him into agreeing to let Bond show him around someday, to banter with him about the places Q might make him sleep and maybe flirt with him about the places Q might make him _sleep_ , and to keep playing. To see whether their combined forces would push the French into such a frenzy of terror that they withdrew and left the indigenous people to flourish.

“Yes, assuming _that_ , Bond, you’re such a pessimist,” Q grumbled. “Good that it’s set on a fictional island—something like Risk to communicate troop movements would be far too obvious.”

“Power cards as an allegory for whatever nefarious plot is being cooked up?” Bond asked dryly.

“Well, obviously _I_ would understand if you laid out a bunch of cards about fire and destruction to suggest an attempted bombing,” Q said. “The difficulty is in communicating to other field agents who might be similarly cut off from Q-branch and who haven’t spent weeks interpreting the twisted way in which you mentally approach a slew of games. And before you say anything, I’m _not_ teaching the entire 00-program to play board games. No. It’s too much. Absolutely not.” Bond tried not to glow warmly at the thought that he was the only double-oh tolerable enough to play games with. “Honestly, the best thing would be a way for you to print new game components in the field that can be used to encrypt key information. How are you with graphic design?”

“I went undercover as a model once.”

“Perhaps not, then,” Q muttered. “Perhaps I should just weaponise the whole box and be done with it. I don’t actually know why I’ve never thought of exploding dice before, given the amount of times you seem to end up dying in a casino.”

Fuck. Just when he thought he couldn’t be any more in love.

When he let himself into his bare, depressing flat that evening, the satcam was already blinking with a waiting call. Sighing, he collapsed into his own leather armchair, which was not nearly as squashy and comfortable as Q’s, and watched Camille’s face flicker into focus.

“So?” she asked impatiently. “How goes it?”

 _“Fuck,”_ he told her, feelingly, and smiled as she laughed herself sick.

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –


	4. Playing for Keeps

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –

GAME NOTES 006: EXPLORE SLOWLY.

The next game Camille sent over, Q took one look at the box and said, “Oh no, you’re not learning this in one night.”

“I’m due in Kinshasa tomorrow,” Bond reminded him.

“They have internet in Kinshasa, don’t they?” Q sniffed.

“I mean,” Bond said.

Which was why, the next day, Q outfitted him with his very own satcam in addition to the communications gear and weaponry he would _actually_ need for this mission. Before Bond turned to leave, Q clamped down on his wrist with an iron grip. “ _Do not_ ,” he said through teeth gritted so hard it looked painful, “lose it. Given that this particular cam is currently sitting in Storage 2F, I will _not_ be able to write it off as another Bond expense.”

The trip to Kinshasa was more of a punishment than an actual mission—Bond would be accompanied by a trainee agent who was nervously conducting her first meeting with an informant, an old, withered ex-diplomat classified as provisionally safe by Intentions’s all-seeing eye of motive and means. The fact that Q had given him the satcam at all was proof of how boring he expected it to be. Bond was serious about the real work he did, but Q was a rigid, unbending combination of fierce protectiveness and deep-rooted shame over how the Silva incident had gone; Bond considered it a sign of deep affection that he at times managed to get a chuckle or a milk-mild quip from Q in times of extreme stress.

For four nights, Bond lay on his hotel bed, listening to the junior agent fume at the hotel’s spotty wifi through the thin walls, and let Q lay out in lingering, exquisite detail the rules for the fiendishly complex board game called Outland that Camille had rushed over. Perhaps that had been her goal all along in assigning this particular cinder-block brick of a game; she’d seemed harried and tense ever since her return from Langley, more so than an encounter with Felix would usually leave her.

After Q explained the complicated system of actions each player could take, Bond said, “Okay, but can I just clarify for the last time: why are there giant robots in 1920s Europe?”

 _“Mechs,”_ Q sniffed. “And the real question you should be asking is why _our_ timeline’s World War One _didn’t_ involve giant robots.”

Bond considered that. “Do you have a mech down in the garage, Q?”

“No,” Q answered too quickly. Bond smiled. Q looked particularly rumpled today over the satcam connection. The background was brightly lit, all fluorescents, but the general hum of Q-branch had faded into something much graver. In Kinshasa, meanwhile, the sun was coming up. He was only an hour ahead of Q, but he suspected his early morning was Q’s very late night. “All quiet on the western front there, Q?”

“Intentions and Analysis are veritable beehives, but no, over here right now it’s just you and two others in the field,” Q said. “You’ve got me all to yourself.”

Bond smiled, quiet, private, given that Q’s attention briefly tracked to something else. He thought of Q’s faint embarrassment last week as he’d admitted the scope of how far he’d travelled. “Then let me give you a tour of Kinshasa.”

“…What?”

“You’ve never been to the continent, right? I was stationed here for two months once, and I’ve been back a handful of times since. I know my way around.”

Q frowned and clicked at something. “Isn’t it still dark where you are?”

“Just let me show you.”

Q huffed. “Fine. If you get shot, I want it known that I thought this was weird from the beginning.”

Bond stood and turned the satcam around so that Q could see out of the window, which was streaked with moisture. They were staying in one of the better hotels in the area with a passel of Western tourists, the better to blend in—nothing exorbitant, though, and the view from the fourteenth floor was of Kinshasa, in all its criss-crossed, teeming, concrete glory, spread out before them. “The radio is always audible, everywhere you go. Even at this early hour, someone is waking up to a Congolese rumba station. The cabs will drive with their windows down—it can get hot—and the music from the insides of the cars will mingle and float up.” Bond stole a glance at the screen; in London, Q had relaxed back into his ergonomic chair, something abstract but enthralled flitting over his face. “It’ll be hot today, not as hot as it gets in the summer here, but still painful, and through the open windows you can buy slivers of ice to melt on your tongue. It’s spring here, and it’s the wet season—and it’s always raining. You think London has rain? Equatorial Africa is about a million times worse. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the sun in this city for longer than half a day at a time.”

“All the Google Image pictures have grey skies,” Q said quietly.

“Bright grey. Rarely the colour of the thunderstorms you get in the American Midwest, or the monsoons in Southeast Asia. There’s light enough to see by. To watch the sunrise by.” He wanted to turn the cam around, to watch Q’s expression as slowly, slowly, the sky brightened from purple-grey to blue-grey, but Q’s encrypted satcams didn’t come with a selfie mode. “The crowds start early, too. It’s not like European cities, with the narrow streets made for different forms of transportation. There’s some of that; on the side roads, unpaved, it’s easier to get around on motorcycle than by car. But the main roads are almost wider than anything you’ll see in London. There are just so _many_ cars, so many bikes and people, it’s not enough. Ha, and the traffic. It’s chaos, almost, but if you look closely enough, you’ll see there are rules. Everywhere, unwritten… not rules, per se. A system, permeable but workable, if you know how to use it. It’s a lovely city to watch, even though sitting quietly is an invitation for someone to come up to sell you something.”

“Like chaos computing,” Q breathed. “It’s not actually chaos, not the way the name suggests. It’s just moving so fast it seems like there’s no music to the notes, no pattern to the colours.”

“Exactly,” Bond said, and continued to describe, in his brusque and unpoetic style, the world Q saw through electronic eyes, but filtered through his own, human gaze, as the sun came up, first in the Congo, then in London, miles and miles and miles away. He couldn’t watch as Q travelled like this, couldn’t see his expression. But the way Q sighed, and laughed, and scoffed at all the right places—Bond thought he could have Q in his ear for the rest of his life and never regret it once.

– ♠ –

GAME NOTES 007: YOU WRITE THE STORY TOGETHER.

“‘You stumble into an echoing, candlelit chamber strewn thickly with spider silk. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the room also contains a large number of oversized spiders. But oddly enough, each spider in the room seems exceptionally well-dressed, elegant even. Most are seated, while a few rest their abundant limbs on these silky strands. One spider coughs politely, as if to suggest that you are interrupting something. One chair remains unoccupied.’ Do you: ‘Attack the spiders, yelling, Die, denizens of the eight-legged empire,’ or ‘Take a seat and attempt to converse?’ Hmm. I wonder how this will play out. I’m on veritable pins and needles.”

“Don’t be such a prick,” Bond said, amused. “Didn’t you hear the descriptions of sartorial splendour? These are my people. Er, my spiders.”

“How was I to know that you’re only a human wrecking ball to the _poorly-dressed_ ,” Q sighs. “Given the number of times I’ve caught you sneering at these trousers, shall I kiss my deposit goodbye?”

That had… not been sneering. “Why don’t you take them off and see if that appeases me?” Bond suggested. Q snorted inelegantly. Bond found it irrepressibly charming.

“I assume you want to attempt to converse, then?” Q said.

“No, I have a feeling that attacking them will be considerably easier.”

“Ugh. You’re so predictable. Roll.”

He rolled for each of his villagers currently exploring down in the caves. Q peered at the results and then read out from the encounter book, his voice precisely the dry-crisp quality of very good white wine and long nights on the comms when Bond had done something inadvisable yet slightly impressive, “‘The booming echo of your voice drives the spiders panicking from the room before you can lay waste to the arachnid horde. You stand alone in a chamber of collapsed chairs as a strangely empty feeling wells up inside you. You can’t help but feel that you missed the point somehow.’”

“It does not say that.”

“It so does! Gain two coins and lose one reputation.”

Bond scowled. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Q’s little counter was leaps and bounds ahead of him on the reputation track of the board, which would give bonus points at the end of the game. “They’re spiders—who are they even gossipping to about me?”

“That’s what you said about the Basque terrorists in June,” Q accused. “And the answer, it turned out, was _everyone._ ”

True. He wasn’t allowed in Spain for another six months for precisely that reason. “Quartermaster, you’re as heartless on the board as you are on the comms.”

Q grinned. “You should see me DM,” he said. Bond sifted through his rolodex of acronyms— _direct message?_ he vaguely wondered—but Q, seeming to sense the slight mental glaze that accompanied this endeavour, clarified, “Dungeon Master. When I was a lowly Operations tech, I had a regular group. Far too busy now, of course.”

“I know you seem to think that clarifies everything, but it doesn’t.”

That was all Q needed to launch into a passionate and elaborate explanation of tabletop role-playing, which was somehow even weirder than coming to the home of a captivating boy every week and playing board games instead of bedding him. “It’s like those party games where you each tell the story a little at a time,” Bond finally hazarded.

“…Yes,” Q said, but like it pained him to do so. He’d explained that he’d been dungeon master most of the time, or game master—something like a cross between a trickster god, a showrunner, and a puppetmaster who mapped out the contours of the adventures the rest of the players would engage in and played the part of the villain and all supporting roles. Bond had to admit, it suited him.

“So you were a bossy little boffin long before it became your job,” Bond said.

Q threw a die at him. “If you’re not careful, the next one will explode,” he said snidely.

“Have you ever thought about designing your own game?” Bond said curiously. Q was an inventor and an engineer; now that he’d asked, it seemed impossible he hadn’t thought of it before.

Q shrugged. “Sometimes. It’s harder than you think. In uni I developed a _Moby Dick_ board game as my final project for a literature class, but that’s collecting dust in storage somewhere, and also it was terrible.”

He thought of le Carré’s books lined up neatly on Q’s shelves, right below the long, narrow shelf on which he’d stacked Camille’s games. “You like spy stories.”

“Yes—and there are a few spy games out there—they’re almost all competitive, though. The hard part of spywork is cooperative, not competitive. I’d love to see something that built on the camaraderie between fellow spies instead of the inherent distrust between nations. It would be nice for the spy conceit to be matched to deduction, but most deduction games are party games, for a minimum of five players… something small, something intimate—I suppose I’m just describing the game I’ve always wanted to find but never have.” He gave Bond a sharp, amused look. “Well? Jump in anytime. You’ve certainly played enough games to have opinions by now.”

Taken aback, Bond dithered over whether to rest his villagers or exhaust them to give himself time to think. Finally, he said, slowly, sounding out the words as the thought came to him, “I’d like… cards, I think, not a board, or not much of one. Boards and maps go hand-in-hand, and… a rigid unchanging list of locations, that’s not what it’s like at all. Spies have mental maps, not paper or cardboard ones, and they change all the time, they change between falling asleep in a city and waking up in it… less a map than a story, I suppose. There’s no room for intuition on a board.”

Q was looking at him with an odd expression. When Bond met his eyes, he visibly shook himself out of it and said, “Cards, then. Lots of combinations for replayability. Perhaps some of them will ask you to play a certain role, take on a certain cover.”

“Gadget cards,” Bond said, smiling. “Use the exploding pen to blow everyone’s cover and draw new ones.”

“Gadget _gadgets_ ,” Q said gleefully. “Tokens that turn into dice. Dice that turn into timers or meeples or what have you.”

Bond grinned and the words came more easily after that. A story wove itself out of nowhere—a spy, obviously, trying to pass information to an ally. Q described number-deduction games and they spent the rest of the game, and the next one, talking about what special powers might help someone determine what number their playmate was thinking of. The game _du jour,_ with the stylised, over-adorable art Bond was wearily suspecting Camille favoured, was a sweet exercise in cave-exploring and village-building called Ups and Downs, and when Q put it away he was already wishing the evening would stretch on for one more game, one more hour, perhaps an hour and a half. Patience, he told himself. He had never been a very patient man, but for Q, for the whisper of a life of late evenings sipping hot cocoa and petting cats and yes, perhaps, playing a board game, he could feign patience for a little while longer.

Q stopped him at the door. “Bond.” He suddenly looked very shy. “Listen, next Thursday, barring international crisis, Moneypenny and Tanner are going to come over for a game night. Would you… like to join us? Perhaps bring something new from your friend?”

“I would love to,” he said, and watched Q’s smile warm the air between them.

– ♠ –

GAME NOTES 008: KNOW HOW TO BLUFF.

He asked Camille for something that would work well with more than two players, and she sent him a poker game. On the one hand, this was a sparkling gem of a tactical move, as he was finally confident that he’d be able to impress Q—he could count the number of games he’d won so far on one hand.

On the other hand, he had a poker date with the Quartermaster, the Chief of Staff, and Moneypenny, who needed no title, which meant he was honour-bound to invite Trevelyan.

Skill in poker was a complicated combination of reading people, probability, and sheer bloody bollocks, and between the two of them, Bond was the better overall player, but Alec was the better bluffer. Their compact was one that had been forged in the ashes after Vesper and Quantum, during which Alec had been out getting his own two kill missions, the long and the short of it being that Bond was no longer allowed to play poker unsupervised unless under direct orders from M or the Queen. There were technicalities he could use, of course. This wasn’t technically poker; it was a poker-based board game called Tropic West. The rule itself wasn’t as important as what it represented, which was Trevelyan’s determination that Bond never, ever compromise himself with an enemy agent so long as he was looking out for him again, and who could be safer than the Quartermaster?

But Alec had been there for him at the worst time of his life, and he owed him better than technicalities.

“Of course 006 can come,” Q had said briskly. “I already wrote off my deposit as a loss due to your frequent visits, anyway.” And so that was that. Within the halls of MI6, what Q said went. More or less.

When he’d asked Alec, he’d just stared at Bond for an uncomfortably long and shocked time before he said, “Sure.”

Later, he would remember the evening as being sparkling as champagne. Q, in extending the invitation to Bond, had apparently not thought far enough ahead to realise that he only had enough chairs to accommodate his, Tanner, and Moneypenny’s usual number of players; Tanner and Bond subsequently sat on the floor, Bond leaning against the legs of Q’s armchair, close enough to feel the heat of Q’s leg bare inches from his face, occasionally even close enough to catch a whisper of wool against his skin as Q shifted.

They taught Alec how to play Vermelha first, one of Q’s games, a puzzley tile-laying affair about mosaic artists, and Bond picked up on things he hadn’t been able to notice the first time he’d seen Moneypenny and Tanner playing with Q. Tanner was deeply invested in the story side of things, sometimes—not often, but sometimes—choosing a less optimal outcome because he felt it was more true to the character he was playing. “Tanner DMs for his daughters,” Q whispered to him. “Can’t break the habit, poor man.” Moneypenny, on the other hand, was as focused and ruthless as a corporate lawyer, a brutal bulldozer punching forward to victory at any cost.

Q, Bond reflected, was neither of those things. Q was thoughtful and thorough, but not intense in the way Moneypenny was; instead, he seemed to be always have one eye on the game and one eye on the rest of them. It was partly tactical, of course, but the warmth of his gaze, the way he watched over them all the way, protective, caring, made Bond think that what mattered more to him than victory was just this: the evening itself, Moneypenny’s bright laughter and Tanner’s exasperated groans.

They pulled out Bond’s game and the alcohol simultaneously.

Tropic West was like a drugged, kaleidoscopic version of Texas Hold’em, like Bond had fallen asleep and dreamed of a mishmash between the board games he spent most of his free time now learning, playing, or thinking about and the game he knew best in the world. They each had characters, ripped straight out of the Old West, each with special powers; the community cards were an ever-shifting grid, and you could use your hole cards with a row or column of the grid to form the best hand; each suite had different powers and there were points instead of chips, and Bond loved it. He’d never played against Moneypenny before, but she was as merciless a poker player as she was a shot. She won a few hands, Alec won a few more, but it was Bond who, at last, took home the prize.

Instead of being miffed, Q beamed at him. “Tell your friend to send a game about mixing cocktails next time,” he said cheerfully, before he helped a tipsy Tanner downstairs into the waiting cab. 

Moneypenny had already gone and Alec was putting on his coat, leaving Bond to loiter for a last drink. He glanced over at Q’s workbench and smiled reflexively. Three innocuous-looking dice were perched on his work mat amid Q’s scattered tools. He glanced over the blueprint being held open by a sleek, loopy paperweight and a letter opener in the shape of a sword that he thought he vaguely recalled from the _Lord of the Rings_ movies. He thought he recognised the internal mechanisms of an EMP. Clever to get it so small, but Q was nothing if not clever. He slipped one of the dice into his pocket, feeling terribly sentimental; not because he thought it might come in handy—there was no guarantee they were even working—but because this felt like proof that it had happened, the weeks and weeks of nights ensconced in Q’s flat with his cats and his games had been real.

When he turned around, Alec was staring at him. “What the fuck are you doing,” he said briskly.

He didn’t mean stealing the die, Bond knew, and his stomach plummeted to his knees. “Cruising for toys?” he suggested.

“I’ll bet,” Alec muttered. “How long have you been having these little game nights with the Quartermaster, James?” Bond shrugged, which was all the ammunition Alec needed. “Christ,” he said under his breath. “I knew you had a crush on him, but…”

“I’m handling it,” Bond said sharply.

“Are you? This doesn’t look like handling it to me. Seduce him and get him out of your system, or better yet, just _ask him out_. This—I don’t know what this is. You’ve seen the gap between being something with him and being nothing with him and you’ve decided to _live there_ , for God’s sake. It’s not healthy.”

“I’m getting there,” Bond protested. “I’m trying to ease him into it.”

“Oh, yeah? How long _have_ you two been doing this? A few weeks? A month?” Bond’s mouth clicked shut. “What is it?” Alec demanded. “Do you think he’ll say no? He’s been playing board games with you for—months, I figure, given the way you won’t answer. He won’t say no.”

Bond opened his mouth, not quite sure of what would come out, but Q chose that moment to slip back inside and smile at them both. “Nightcap before you go?”

 _He won’t say no_ , Bond remembered later that night as he sat in his own bleak, empty flat, staring at a glass of scotch and trying to explain himself to the blankly judgemental stare of a porcelain bulldog. But he might. He _might_ , that was the problem, and Bond didn’t want to fuck this up, couldn’t fuck this up. He couldn’t tell Alec any of this, the insecurity that had curdled within him, settled permanently next to his organs, the more he got to know Q: brilliant, lonely, astonishing Q, Q who deserved so much better than a rusted-out weapon banged and broken in service to Her Majesty, Q who deserved something as bright and shiny and new as the guns he made for Bond’s own hand. 

Alec was right; he was torturing himself because he was afraid. Afraid of Q, afraid of the depth and breadth of the affection he felt for him. Most embarrassingly of all, he was afraid that if he did make his move and Q said no—or perhaps even if he said yes—these evenings, these perfect gems of a game and a smile, would end. And that he couldn’t bear.

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –


	5. Win Condition

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –

GAME NOTES 009: BEWARE ANALYSIS PARALYSIS.

When December dawned, the air darkening from crisp-cold to biting, Bond was standing in Bonn’s central square, watching the Christmas market swarm around him and feeling very out of his depth.

By the time he’d left London on the twenty-ninth, Moneypenny had already been popping up in shadowy corridors raking operatives, analysts, and administrators alike into the service-wide Secret Santa gift exchange. It was an initiative of the new M, who was, for the second year in a row, futilely trying to make team-building and office holiday spirit a less painfully stiff affair; the old woman would have shot someone before she allowed the words “Secret Santa” to pass her lips, but Mallory, whom Bond still thought of as _the new M_ years later, had been addled by years in politics and thus was strangely willing to ask his country’s assassins to spend £20 on a scarf for Deborah in Accounting. Bond had escaped being press-ganged into Christmas spirit service last year by spending the whole month sunning himself on a beach in Bali, Madeleine growing progressively unhappier by his side.

This year, he was startled to have looked over, seen Moneypenny harassing a junior agent into inputting his name into the tablet she was aggressively shaking at him, and _lost his damn mind._ “Tell you what, Moneypenny, I’ll trade you Secret Santa favours,” he said as the junior agent scuttled off.

Moneypenny was surprised, but she hid it well. “What kind of favours?”

“Pull a specific name out of the hat for me and I’ll recruit the double-ohs for you.”

She pursed her lips; getting the double-ohs to participate would be a coup, Bond knew, one she wouldn’t be able to resist. He would likely have to spend a few favours of his own among the program to get them to comply, but an idea was dawning in his head, bright and giddy, one that would have the side benefit of _shutting up_ Alec’s doubtful, faintly mocking voice rumbling _Just ask him out_ in the back of his head. “What name?” she said suspiciously. She already knew, of course, but a good spy never tipped her hand unless she absolutely had to.

Bond, too, was a very good spy. He arched a brow at her. “Do we have a deal? If we do, this stays between us.”

“Fine,” she said. “One name for nine. You realise I’m getting the better deal here, James.”

She really wasn’t. He took the proffered tablet and entered his name into the Secret Santa program that a Q-branch intern had probably been tasked with setting up.

That had been the easy part. Even convincing the other double-ohs, which he'd done in the idle hours before he'd left for the airport, would've gone off without a hitch if it hadn't been for Alec's incredulous, "What has that boy _done_ to you?" This, though, Bond thought as he stood in a square festooned with fairy lights, with some variety of tiny evergreen twinkling out at him from pots in every corner, with a Nativity scene on his left and a stall from which wonderful hot chocolate smells were wafting on his right and people, everywhere, shopping, _shopping_ —he'd defused bombs easier than picking out a present for Q.

Bond drifted through a haze of gingerbread, fried sausage, and burnt almonds, past the façades of temporary Christmas booths that had been artfully constructed to look like small festive houses, past the half-English half-German babble of families and hagglers, past the glowing ferris wheel and the hand-carved ornaments and the wooden Santa trinkets the small children were fondling. He’d sent Q an album’s worth of postcards, but never any souvenirs, a tradition he’d started on impulse in Manila with Madeleine that he was sorely regretting now. Maybe if he’d been bringing Q little copper Eiffel towers from Vegas and tea samples from Assam all along, he’d know whether Q might prefer a little metalwork “Q” paperweight or a festive mousepad blinking with fairy lights. When he found himself staring at a stack of handmade baskets he knew he was heading down the wrong path and roughly shook himself back to reality.

What did you get the man who had, if not everything, everything it was possible to get with money alone? If Bond could buy him a happier childhood or a family or enough leave time to see the world he would have, but these things, sadly, were out of the price range of both M’s Secret Santa stipulations and the medium-sized fortune he’d amassed from old family wealth and hazard pay over the years.

One would think months of playing board games each week with the man would naturally lend itself to a particular kind of gift, but Bond, in what he was realising was a major lapse of intelligence-gathering on his part, had failed to memorise the titles of Q’s massive, sprawling collection. This diplomatic escort mission had taken him to Germany (specifically, the setting of Q’s favourite book and the town where he had given Bond a copy as well), where, he had learned from weeks of Q’s cheerful, mindless jabber about the industry, a massive board game convention introduced the world to the next big thing months before it would hit the English-speaking market, but that was as far as his depth of knowledge about board games in Germany went. And he couldn’t give Q just any old game. The thought of misestimating Q’s tastes and preferences after so many moments spent sunk into his presence, so much time in which Q had patiently and effusively coached Bond through the intricacies of each game, baring a little more of his own soul in the process—the thought of getting a pained smile or a polite invitation to play a game that would turn out to be dreadfully boring—no. Intolerable. Bond’s gift had to be thoughtful, enjoyable, perfectly tailored not just to Q but to Bond himself, a gesture laden with the promise of many board game nights to come. 

Fuck. He needed a pick-me-up. He stopped by a Feuerzangenbowle stall and slurped irritably at the steaming mulled wine flavoured with rum-soaked sugar. It did nothing to help him get into a seasonal mood.

“Why don’t you just ask him?” Alec said boredly as they ate lunch on the roof of the new MI6 building four days after his return from Germany. A gaggle of analysts were smoking on the far side of the building, but they gave a wide berth to the pair of assassins and their sandwiches.

Bond scowled. He couldn’t just _ask Q_ what he wanted for Christmas, just like he couldn’t just _ask him out_. It simply wasn’t how things were done in the grand, sweeping love stories he’d appropriated for research in lieu of his own experiences. “It wouldn’t be a surprise.”

“He monitors your credit card history, James. I doubt it’ll be a surprise anyway.”

“You’re a true romantic.”

“What do you want from me? Experience tells me you’re doing it backwards: you’re supposed to fuck him first, then get the intel from him.”

“He’s not a mark,” Bond sighed. “Trust me, I’ve thought about how much easier this would be if he were.”

“Only from your lips could I ever hear something so ass-backwards,” Alec grumbled. Bond shrugged. He could hardly tell him the other reason he was determined to sweep Q off his feet with a grand gesture, which had to do what he’d said over the next game Camille had sent the day after Bond had returned from Bonn.

“Oh, good,” he’d said brightly, shuffling a deck roughly the height of his head. “I’ve only played Colonizing Jupiter once before.”

“Observation nights with Moneypenny and Tanner?”

“Ex.” Briskly, Q had checked that all the resource squares, money, and terraforming tiles were in the correct place. “We played once before he had his little breakdown about whether I was playing games with _anyone else_. When he left, he took it with him.”

“Were you?” Bond had asked, purely curious. Q kept a fiercely guarded wall between the persona of the quartermaster and his personal life. Bond liked to think he would’ve been able to tell if Q had been under the personal strain of juggling multiple lovers, but he hadn’t even known that Q had dated recently until he’d told him just now, so perhaps not.

Q had rolled his eyes. “I was cheating on him with work,” he’d said dryly. “That was around when 002’s extraction got bollocksed to hell and I stayed in-branch for over a week. On Day 4, Moneypenny swung by to get me some clothes, which was the death knell of that relationship, I suppose, or so the note I found when I finally got home implied. I do like to think that anyone I date for six months would know me better than to think I would end a relationship by hiding myself away like a coward and sending my new paramour over to inform them that it’s over, but Jason wasn’t exactly the most explosive pen in the armoury, if you know what I mean.”

If you were working tirelessly to get my colleague home alive, I’d give you back rubs and biscuits, not an ultimatum, Bond had thought. Another reason why they’d be perfect for each other, if he ever figured out how to turn back on the part of his brain that knew how to communicate directly, instead of through the heady mix of innuendo and insinuation that spies were exclusively fluent in. “Jason sounds like a tool,” he’d tried. Q had laughed, which made his skin prickle pleasantly.

“Yes, well. He also once panicked after he was caught kissing me at the theatre and told his boss that I was his cousin, which, in hindsight, should’ve been a sign for me to get far away as fast as possible. I like my men a little quicker on their feet than _adagio_.” 

Another flush of heat, less pleasant this time. “He wasn’t out?” Bond had asked as he’d introduced tardigrades to the harsh environment of a slowly-evolving Jupiter.

“Conditionally. You know how it is.”

“Actually, I don’t,” Bond had said. “I’ve been out since I joined the Service.”

“You’ve been out since you joined MI6’s Queen-and-Country corps of hypermasculine field agents,” Q had repeated dryly.

Bond had shrugged. “On our side, it’s a benefit for an agent to be flexible. On theirs, anyone who’s going to decide I’ve forfeited my humanity is going to do so because I’m a British spy long before they do because I’m a queer.”

Q had bit his lip, which was quite fetching and also distracting. “That… makes sense. And explains why the most heterosexual person in the whole building is Tanner, actually.”

“Tanner might surprise you,” Bond had told him warmly. He’d met his rather avant-garde wife, after all.

“Stop,” Q had said, half-laughing. He turned a hex of Jupiter to ocean. In spite of the way his colonizer rating had advanced, when his laughter had stopped he’d seemed a little melancholy. “It’s different for normal people. If you’re… expendable. There’s a reason I don’t talk about any of this at work. You and me and Jason—it’s not a level playing field. A fair comparison.”

“You’re not expendable, Q,” Bond had said firmly.

“No,” Q had said, a cool victory settling into his words. “Not anymore.”

 _But I used to be,_ Bond had heard, and ached. Q didn’t _flame_ precisely, but he definitely emitted a low but persistent aura of not-straight. It would’ve been difficult for him growing up, difficult to be a boffin, a shy, small cog in MI6’s great machine. Quartermaster suited him down to his bones, the freedom and power to be unapologetically himself, but still—there was a shadow there, a reminder of the small coverings-up one engaged in every day to be just a little _less_ in every direction. “You had to hide with him,” he’d said, instead of saying any of the things which were making his heart hurt.

“Conditionally.” Q hadn’t smiled. Rare—he was usually smiling at Bond, just a thin twist of the lips, but sometimes blossoming into something very much like joy. “I understood, of course, but once you have the power to live as yourself… your patience for the other way decreases very rapidly. Sometimes I just wanted a grand gesture, something that would prove that he was proud to have me, and damn what anyone else might say.” He’d nodded at the board. “Your move.”

And, well—what was a grander gesture than confessing your love in a present on Christmas Eve in front of the amassed body of the entire MI6 holiday ball? 

“Look,” Alec told him now, “you’re never going to find the perfect gift, you’ll chicken out, and this time next year you’ll be whining to me on this very rooftop about how he’s never going to love you. Just ask him for a drink. You can do drinks, can’t you?”

Sure, Bond could do drinks. Bond was good at drinks; Bond knew how drinks worked, the ins and outs of a casual invitation that would almost certainly end in sex. But for the first time he was going to try to do something much stranger and scarier than his usual seduction schemes: he was going to try Christmas.

– ♠ –

“Oh, look,” Q said cheerfully as he opened the game of Unfurl Bond had brought like a stray attempting to bribe the nice homeowner into taking him in, “it’s a dice tower.”

“A what?”

“You assemble it and it’s got little ledges on the inside so the dice are good and shaken up each time you roll,” Q said, struggling with the cardboard punch-outs. He scowled; Bond rescued him and set to work putting together a little cardboard birdfeeder, whose finicky tabs and slots seemed to stymie his quartermaster even though he’d once seen him defuse a bomb smaller than his fingernail in under two minutes. “I want one for A Spy Game.”

A Spy Game was what they were calling the imaginary board game that acquired depth and detail almost every time they met, and once, memorably, over lunch at the MI6 commissary. “Painfully and ironically nondescript, like an undercover agent,” Q had said gleefully when Bond had suggested the name. “I love it.” They’d added dice for an element of chance; event cards each had two to six different flavour-text outcomes depending on the die roll. (Bond was still lobbying for special outcomes based on craps rolls, like being bitten by something venomous if the player rolled snake eyes.)

“You couldn’t just… shake the dice particularly hard?” Bond asked dryly as he snapped the roof of the bird feeder/dice tower into place.

“It’s about _component quality_ , Bond,” Q sniffed. “Demonstrating that the game is a cut above from the very first moment.” Bond shrugged. He was a man who wore tailored suits even when he didn’t have to; he could appreciate that. “Here, help me shuffle all the bird cards.” Bond set aside his dignity and obliged; when Q’s eyes had gone very round and he’d made approving noises about the amount of buzz this particular game had been getting the moment he’d laid eyes on it, Bond had dutifully swallowed his misgivings about the fact that this game seemed to revolve around collecting birds and let Q tear into the rulebook with a bright ferocity.

Q hadn’t played this one before, so they read the rules together, Bond pushing the hour and a half Camille had spent playing practice games with him out of his mind. It felt nice, the same way that their idle back-and-forth about A Spy Game felt nice; like they were building something together. It wasn’t much like missions, which were in the end hierarchical, even though each person in that hierarchy would disagree about who was ultimately on top; it was more like sitting next to Q in his garage or his workshop, passing him the occasional tool and making snide remarks about how he looked in his massive safety goggles, or less-snide remarks about how he looked in just an undershirt with engine grease smeared over his surprisingly leanly muscled arms. It felt like partnership, he imagined. It had been a very long time since he’d felt anything remotely resembling it.

As had become usual, as they set up the game they talked about how they might adapt the rules for themselves. “Bonus cards,” Q said. “Gain five extra points if you have over three undamaged pieces of equipment at the end of the game, seven if you have over five.”

“How do you damage equipment in this game anyway?” Bond said, amused.

Q shrugged. “Discard a piece of equipment to save your hide. I do realise that your abysmal return rate isn’t really an attempt to piss me off.”

“It is a little,” Bond confessed. Q laughed in spite of himself, proof that the Q he was glimpsing in these quiet moments wasn’t the quartermaster but just _Q;_ even though Bond only knew him by a name associated with his job, Q at home, Q over games, was a completely different person, warm and generous and sly and sweet. He loved both, the quartermaster and Q, but though he’d fallen in love with the quartermaster, it was Q who he’d come to treasure, Q who he was addicted to, who he couldn’t risk giving up. “Hazard meters. Gain 10 Quartermaster’s Annoyance and you have to draw a calamity card.”

Q snorted. “I’d never inflict true calamity on you, no matter how much you annoy me.”

“Economy class counts.”

“+2 Straining Your Precious Back,” Q mocked. He dealt their cards and cackled. “I really shouldn’t tell you this, but I have a calling bird in my hand and I’m tempted to hold out for partridges or turtledoves.”

Staring at his own Bronzed Cowbird, Bond had a flush of inspiration. He knew now exactly what to get Q in the Secret Santa, and it would technically qualify as a homemade gift, no matter how much he spent on it. In his head, he lined up the people he would have to speak to—designers, printers, perhaps a craftsman or two—as they started to play, Q’s bright, beaming joy at unwrapping the game they’d been building together shining out in his mind like a beacon, like hope.

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today is my birthday! If you would like to make my day, please comment.


	6. How to Win Games and Influence Meeples

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –

GAME NOTES 0010: GAMES ARE FOR THOSE THAT PLAY THEM.

By the time the next game arrived, Bond was gagging for a break from his relentless quest to craft Q the perfect Christmas present. He’d gotten in touch with several designers and the operator of a 3D printer at a local makerspace, and he and Q had already done most of the hard work of developing enough tongue-in-cheek gadget, cover, and mission cards based on their own lives to fill out a preliminary game, but coordinating it all was a nightmare. Bond gloomily thought that what he needed to pull this off was a Q. Sadly, all he had was an Alec, who ran the errands he requested, but with much eye-rolling and pessimistic banter about his chances.

Q, of course, wasn’t feeling a sense of impending doom about the coming holidays at all. He hummed Christmas carols as he unpacked their game, a “legacy” version of their very first game, Affliction, that asked you to play the game twelve times, with the outcome of each game permanently affecting the game going forward. “You’re in a festive mood,” Bond said.

“Am I?” Q said cheerfully. He was wearing a green jumper that was only terrible because of how poorly it hung off of his slim frame and the way it blared BIRCH PLEASE in large white letters. Bond gave the jumper a lingering, pointed look, then let his gaze skip languidly to the lights wreathing the windows, the already-dying poinsettia on his worktable, and the small but gaudy mini Christmas tree perched by his elbow. At work, Q-branch was as stalwart a beacon of professionalism as ever, except for the way small holly springs had been tucked between cubicles, and of course, the branch head’s wardrobe. Q smiled, a little too sweet to be as enigmatic as he was clearly going for. “Are you like this every year?” Bond asked, amused.

“Oh, yes,” Q said. Tonight he’d mulled wine for them both, and was a little pink-cheeked and tipsy around the edges already. “I have a system, actually. It tended to annoy friends and exes and what have you when I started getting ready mid-November, so now I slowly step up the Christmas preparations over the month of December. It’s the second week of December, so the Christmaswear comes out.”

“What happens next week?” Bond asked with a raised eyebrow.

“The _really terrible_ Christmaswear comes out,” Q said gleefully. “You haven’t seen anything yet, Bond. I have a fireplace jumper with a display pocket for my phone to simulate actual fire. I have _light-up jumpers._ They’re awful and I love them.”

“I never pictured you as a Christmas person,” Bond said, then froze. Was that too revealing, the notion that he’d spent time imagining what Q was like outside of his frumpy work suits and stern quartermaster mien?

Luckily, Q was too wine-warmed to notice. “I _love_ Christmas. ‘All the lights are shining so brightly everywhere / and the sound of children’s laughter fills the air,’” he warbled, adding an _awful_ jazz-like arpeggio to the end. Bond felt a terrible spasm of fondness somewhere in the region of his diaphragm. “I love everything about it.”

“Not even you could love Harrods in December,” Bond said fondly, though he was actually not sure on this count; he’d seen the unreserved sweetness with which Q treated his monster-cat Mr. Turner.

“The secret to loving Harrods in December is to just never go to Harrods,” Q said confidentially.

The first game they played that evening continued in a similar vein, a refreshing headfirst plunge into what Bond fancied was an endless puzzle, the quest to pull more of Q out of the small, cramped box where he’d stuffed his past and all the versions of himself that had come before. Q’s barbs, while not quite lethal, could still cut an unwary seeker to bits, and Bond enjoyed the duck-and-weave of it all. But joy brought out an entirely different side of him, and drawing pieces of his past was now like coaxing gumdrop candy from a surly store owner, each surprise melting brightly on his tongue. 

Q, he discovered, loved the exactitude of wrapping a crisp-edged present. Q’s favourite flavour of anything was peppermint because his Nana had made peppermint hot chocolate when he was tiny. Q loved Christmas because there had always, always been a Christmas tree, no matter where he spent the holidays, and sometimes he could sit down beside it and read as coloured fairy lights flashed over his face, as it grew dark outside and quiet inside and it felt like the only thing in the world could be him under the lights, the sheltering branches of the tree above his head.

Q, in college, had worked at a Santa’s grotto as an elf. (This particular revelation made Bond laugh himself into a coughing fit, and Q had only smiled—smiled!—indulgently as he panted for breath. Well, smiled and abandoned Bond to clear up an outbreak on his own in East Asia. He supposed he deserved that.)

“I suppose you despise Christmas, you Scrooge, you Grinch,” he accused Bond as they set up the next game, having eked out a feeble victory against a disease that had, at the start, shocked them with a revelation that it was incurable, enabling them to upgrade their characters.

“Noise and slush,” Bond answered honestly.

“Bond, you have a deeply unromantic soul,” Q said. “Come on, I’ve bared my elven heart. Only fair you share in the embarrassing confessional stage of mulled wine intoxication. No one feels _nothing_ about Christmas, it’s either a deep joy or a deep loathing.”

That was fair, right? That was sort of thing normal people who were in normal relationships with beautiful men whom they liked a normal amount did. He said, slowly, “I liked it when I was younger, but it seemed like any other holiday to me. My parents and I always went away somewhere. I liked… the predictability of it, I suppose. I never knew when my mother would come and rush me off my feet somewhere exotic, but I always knew we’d be going somewhere for Christmas.”

It was raining again outside; white Christmases were vanishingly rare in London, but grey Christmases were all but assured. “Always a woman nipping at your heels, eh?” Q teased. Bond smiled, but it felt strange on his face.

“After Hannes died, I didn’t celebrate again until the Navy,” he said. “On a ship, it didn’t matter if you weren’t Christian or if you had bad memories or anything else… it was infectious. There was a prayer service, and you didn’t have to go to that if you didn’t want to, but the gifts, the decorations… we used to see who could come up with the strangest place to hide a Christmas tree… one year, Ahmed won with a tree made of socks he hid under his bed.” He hesitated, then added, “That’s one of my only regrets, I think, about joining MI6. What we do can be so solitary. In many ways it suits me, but… Christmas has never been the same.”

Q was very quiet. Bond snuck a glance at him; he was looking at him with a strange brightness around his eyes. “It’s a family thing,” he said softly.

Bond felt irony twist his mouth. “Perhaps that’s why last year—” he said, then cut himself off sharply. Even he knew that this was no man’s-land; talking about the ex before you even asked for a date? No.

But Q said, “Last year?” and his expression was so soft and open and Bond felt himself falling into it, falling into him… believing, even as a spy, that what he said might not be held against him. It was a fallacy, of course, but… a lovely one.

“Even at the best of times,” he said, sounding the words out slowly, probing for a wine-weakness in his judgement and finding none, finding that he really did want to unburden himself to Q, all his failures and weaknesses and bad memories, “Madeleine and I were never family. She could never forget… I was there when the last family she had died.”

Without warning, Q’s hand found its way into his.

Bond jerked, a tiny motion of his shoulders, but the surprise melted away into shocked contentment at the warm press of those long, calloused fingers against his own. He knew Q had poor circulation, had seen him rubbing blood back into his fingers in the depths of Q-branch, that he had a miniature space heater humming along next to his designated keyboard in operations, but tonight his hands were very warm from where he’d been holding the mug of mulled wine. Bond stared at where their fingers were intertwined and felt something terrifying rise up within him. He searched for words and came up with only _fuck_.

“I loved Christmas, but it could still be… very lonely,” Q said softly. “You left a family when you came to MI6, but… I found one. Last year, Penny and I were each other’s plus-ones to Tanner’s family dinner. It… you’re right, what we can do can be very solitary. But it doesn’t have to be, James. If you don’t let it.”

Books in his suitcase and a voice over comms. Bond _ached_.

“Will you be going to Tanner’s again this year?” he heard himself say. Q smiled at him, bright as Christmas, and withdrew. Bond felt cold in his absence.

“No,” he said. “Well, I don’t know. I might have other plans.”

He gave Bond a very meaningful look then, but Bond was at a loss to figure out what he might have meant by it, too consumed with daydreams about how Q might spend Christmas in his arms.

– ♠ –

GAME NOTES 0011: YOU WIN SOME…

As December wound on, MI6 was rapidly approaching a state of tizzy as agents were recalled home and the Holiday Ball drew ever closer. Bond didn’t think these two things were related; not even the Christmas spirit moved the all-knowing mission overseers of Operations when lives were on the line. No, something big was beginning to shift underground, and in a rare circumstance, Bond was content to wait for his orders to deal with it. He had his hands full enough with this damned gift.

Once, very long ago, before his file had a number instead of a name, M had told him that he was going to burn out if he made his life nothing but the world and its well-being. He’d rather proved her point by running off the moment his first mission as a double-oh was, he’d thought at the time, completed. The solution, he’d thought then with a stunning clarity he’d lost over the years, was to seal his heart off so that nothing could ever distract him so again.

But he was much older now, and a little wiser, and for the first time in a long time he thought the world could rather take care of itself for one Christmas. It had Moneypenny and Tanner and Trevelyan and Camille and Felix, and, yes, even the new M. It would be all right. For just another month, it would be all right.

As for Bond—he would win his beautiful boy and take him to bed for a cuddle and maybe a board game, and then he would return to the world, refreshed, and ready to serve out the rest of his life in service with someone he loved in his ear, by his side.

– ♠ –

Amid the many, many complications of getting a board game printed in a matter of weeks, he’d begun to look forward to his nights with Q as a sort of staggering relief from the endless questions of printing orders and design matters that had overtaken his flat. A week and half before Christmas and attempting to shake off a catastrophic 3D-printing failure that threatened to throw the whole affair into jeopardy, he nodded at Q’s doorman and felt his shoulders relax as he waited outside Q’s flat carrying a box that read _Oxidation_. He’d done a little research of his own and thought that this was a particularly good choice of Camille’s; it had won a lot of science prizes a few years ago.

Q opened the door, caught sight of what he was holding, huffed a laugh, and looked at him with such unreserved warmth that Bond felt it rattle all the way down his spine.

“Well, come in, then,” he said, and Bond stumbled inside, reeled in like a fish on a line.

Q took the box from him and looked up at Bond through his lashes; he was only a few centimetres shorter, but that hot-eyed gaze made Bond want to melt around him, surround him, encase him in himself. Casting about wildly for something normal to say, Bond blurted, “I was surprised when you called—it’s like someone tipped over an anthill in operations—”

“I’m sure my relative abundance of free time will vanish the moment they have an actually actionable piece of intel,” Q said, sounding distracted. “Are we going to have sex tonight or what?”

“What,” Bond said. “Wait—no— _what?”_

“It’s only that we’ve had twelve or so dates by my count, not including all the lunches you’ve brought me and the evenings you’ve spent loitering in-branch while I was running a mission and that time we ran into each other at the Aldi and you followed me back to mine so you could make fun of the wine I bought,” Q said blithely.

“I admit,” he continued, “I had my reservations at first, but you wore me down around the time you stopped bothering with this fiction of making board games the next Enigma code.”

“You… knew about the games.”

Q crossed over to his bookshelf and slotted the latest board game in place. Bond squinted at the line of Camille’s games and realised abruptly that they weren’t arranged in the order they’d arrived and been played, but by, he determined after a minute, the date they’d been posted, with the results Camille’s tussle with the Langley Post Office sorted back into an orderly line. It was easy now to see the barely-hidden message in the first letter of each word: ASK HIM OUT CULO.

“You knew about it all,” Bond said numbly.

“Yes,” Q smiled ruefully. “Your friend, she’s not very subtle.”

“No,” Bond agreed. “I think someone once told her it was better to be efficient than subtle.”

“I wonder who?” Q laughed. He sparkled in the multicoloured brightness cast by the fairy lights in the window, by the lamp in the corner, by the rushing heart of London outside. Bond drifted toward the hint of teasing in his voice, captivated, still feeling out of his depth, capsized and off-guard in a way he hadn’t felt in a long, long time. Since he was shot off a bridge in Istanbul. Since Vesper had sat across from him and drawled, “All right,” when he’d finished his amateur attempt at psychoanalysis, and had proceeded to take him apart in every way that mattered. Q was watching him, elfin almost in his beauty, the same sort of smile Vesper had had playing around his lips, that of a predator with much-valued prey between its claws.

Bond drew back and said, “If you knew—why’d you keep playing, then? Why did you let the game go on when you’d already won?”

“It’s not a game, James,” Q said. His smile had softened and there was an unbearable gentleness in his voice. No longer a hunter, but a tamer of the wild, extending a soothing hand to a beast so frightened it might break apart. “Not like the games we’ve been playing. Not like our jobs, all zero-sum, where the only way forward is to win. Maybe I thought it was nice. Maybe I wanted to spend the time with you. Maybe I liked them, our nights together. Maybe I liked you.”

“Did you?” Bond breathed. He was close now, close enough to taste the peppermint mocha on Q’s breath, his whole field of vision taken up by that glorious, coy smile. “Like me?”

“I liked you. I like you still,” Q said softly. “I lo—”

In his pocket, Bond’s phone made a terrible screeching noise and flashed so bloodily red he could see it through the fabric of his trousers. The priority alert. Bond closed his eyes and wished badly to skip back in time just two minutes.

But Q’s phone had chimed with the same awful, moment-killing noise, and he was already drawing away, his brow furrowed as he glanced down. Bond watched his eyes dart across the screen, a shadow already falling across his face, the quartermaster returned. “Well,” Q said after a moment, false-lightly. “Terrorists certainly have terrible timing, don’t they?” He glanced up and saw that Bond was still staring at him, hunger probably writ large across his face. “You should check your phone, James,” Q said softly. “I have a feeling there’ll be a mission for you on it.”

Grudgingly Bond shoved his hand in his pocket and drew out his phone. Sure enough, floating on top of the screen was an urgent summons from M and bare details: imminent attack by ideological splinter group of Bolivian Santa Cruz cartel, embassies at risk, joint CIA mission, blah, blah. He looked at Q, for once at a total loss for words, and waited for his quartermaster to point him in the right direction.

Q smiled at him. He stepped close and pressed a kiss, terribly tender and sweet, to his jawline. “Be home for Christmas,” Q said briskly. “I expect us to pick up where we left off.”

Bond saluted him. He thought of that kiss all the way to Vauxhall, to Gatwick, all the way on the plane to Bogotá until he finally drifted off to sleep somewhere over the Atlantic.

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –


	7. Victory Points

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –

GAME NOTES 0012: …AND SOME YOU’VE WON BEFORE YOU’VE EVEN BEGUN.

Bond, because he was a professional, threw himself into his job and spent the next week single-mindedly focused on identifying and containing the dirty bombs the cartel offshoot calling itself the Ministers of Death had prepared to target the British and American embassies on Christmas day. He absolutely did not _pout_ , no matter what Camille and Felix said.

Camille and Felix discovered over the course of this mission that they had one thing in common outside of the bedroom after all, and that was a shared love of mocking Bond. As she waited on a rooftop in Boston with a sniper rifle for Felix’s contact to try and come kill him and Bond, she recounted the whole sorry affair with glee, Felix’s cackles sending cold puffs of breath into the air as Bond hunched into his coat resentfully.

“—and I asked him if he had any questions and he shrugged and took a sip of his expensive scotch and said, ‘Remind me again what one of these little cubes is called again?’”

Felix laughed so hard he almost didn’t notice when their contact whirled from his hiding place and a bullet zinged past his ear.

“You know,” Bond said later as he watched Felix stomp on his contact’s wrist, “you don’t have to try so hard to impress him. Ask him out, _zorra._ ”

“Oh, so you noticed my little message after all,” Camille said, bored. He was absolutely not going to tell Camille that it had been Q who had figured it out. “Good. I was running out of insults to spell out.”

“He likes barbecue. The way to an American’s heart is through his stomach, you know. I could give you tips on pairing drinks to a menu—”

“Shut up. I have a sniper rifle and I’m not afraid to use it.”

It was a good thing, Bond thought, that the days he spent in first Bogotá, then Boston, then Washington DC, flew by quickly in a haze of blood, bullets, and skipping from one lead to the next at a breakneck pace; it left him little time to think about Q, waiting at home, breathing _“Be home for Christmas”_ into his ear every night in his dreams, and even less time to contemplate saying something inappropriate and/or highly soppy and embarrassing over the comms. He and Q spoke in brisk, clipped exchanges of information, every fleeting contact an attempt to cram as much information into each other’s heads as possible before their satellite position changed and they lost their secure line.

Still, little reminders of Q and their nights together popped up everywhere, and not just in Camille’s spirited retellings for Felix’s benefit. He lost his comms on the third day, and when a captive let slip something mid-interrogation about Britain’s economic weaknesses that he wasn’t sure he wanted the NSA to know about, he found himself at a local board game store buying a copy of Castles of Crimson, strategically removing certain pieces, and then shipping the whole lot to Q-branch. Q would figure it out; he always did.

He got the comms back on Day 7, and on Day 9, he found himself in a warehouse that hadn’t been _abandoned_ so much as renovated into a massive staging ground for multiple assaults on US soil. “Well,” Q said as Bond angled his pinhole camera to catch the massive racks of servers stretching far back into the main room of the warehouse until shadow swallowed them up. “That’s concerning.”

Bond grunted and started looking around for something to blow the whole facility up.

“Don’t,” Q said. “The closest emergency services have been diverted to the other side of town. The Americans won’t be happy if you burn down a whole county.”

“The Americans’ agent is outside buying me time to burn down this county.”

“I have a better idea,” Q said. “That is, as long as your magpie tendencies to stockpile anything you can get your grubby little mitts on hold true.”

“Ouch,” Bond said, not quite sure how he had been insulted but sure that he had been.

“Still have that die you nicked off my worktable?” Q asked.

“Why yes,” Bond said, a slow smile spreading over his face. “Yes, I do.”

He might have temporarily lost the comms, but the die he’d carried with him through bleeding all over one set of clothes, losing most of the others in a locker room when cornered at a community swimming pool, being captured, escaping in a stolen guard’s uniform, and Camille’s relentless mockery. By any standards of tech-detection, it was just a plastic die, harmless and non-transmitting in a way that Q’s sleek, compact earpieces were not. A good luck charm, perhaps. But it grounded Bond to Q in a way that made him all the more dangerous.

He hesitated as he left it among the servers. “Don’t worry,” Q said, as though he’d read Bond’s mind. “I’ll make you another.”

“Was that an EMP?” Felix asked, impressed as every electronic in a three-block radius except for Bond’s own earpiece shorted out. “And you had it in your _pocket?_ The range on that—it’s incredible.”

“You can call it that,” Bond told him. “I call it a game-changer.”

– ♠ –

With their technical infrastructure down, the terrorists were scattered and easy pickings. The CIA swooped in to imprison people, which was what they were best at—Bond let M handle the sticky paperwork aspect of getting a few culprits extradited to Britain so that MI6’s own interrogators could get an investigation with a much more narrow focus on the UK’s interests underway. He boarded his flight back to London at 10AM on Christmas Eve, calculating that he could probably change into the suit he kept spare at headquarters and make it in time for the holiday ball; he wouldn’t have a present for Q, of course, but perhaps a sweeping, dramatic kiss under the mistletoe would do.

Then he spent six hours pacing the terminal at JFK as a raging snowstorm delayed his flight—and delayed it—and delayed it. By the time he’d arrived back in London, he was irritated, jetlagged, and had missed the ball by—he checked his watch—two hours. Not even the tipsiest of the harpies from Accounting would still be lingering at the hotel ballroom M had rented out for the event.

Discouraged, he trudged back to headquarters, not even bothering to skirt the bare-bones security team that had been stuck with—or perhaps volunteered for—gate duty on Christmas Eve. Not even M was there for him to report to; on the door to the atrium where Moneypenny’s desk sat was a cheery little sign, ringed with cartoon holly, informing anyone seeking his attention that he’d be back on Boxing Day. Exhausted, poking morosely at the bloodless bullet graze that had torn the shoulder of his suit open that he hadn’t noticed before, he headed to the showers by the training and exercise rooms. As he padded into the locker room in a towel, somehow feeling even more beaten to exhaustion and wondering if perhaps Q might like Christmas dinner at the Connaught after Bond had slept for fourteen hours and found a suitable replacement gift—perhaps a hideous pair of socks of the kind Q seemed to favour, wrapped up in a stocking—a familiar, annoying voice drifted out. “Heard about the DC job. Not bad.”

Bond grunted and eyed the contents of his locker speculatively. Sweats or his spare suit?

“We missed you at the ball,” Alec said, leaning against the doorframe, looking frustratingly festive in a mostly-undone suit. _Someone_ had clearly been pulling at the ball, or perhaps in the broom closets of MI6 afterward with the night staff. “Still, the Bolivian ambassador is alive and we’re not currently at war with half of South America, so I guess it was a fair trade-off.”

Bond grunted and reached for the sweats.

“Wear the suit,” Trevelyan advised, and turned on his heel to ghost away like the well-rested pillock he was.

Bond frowned at him. Alec had never had strong opinions on his clothes before, except a mild preference for Brioni over Tom Ford and the one time he’d literally forced a bulletproof vest over Bond’s head, ignoring his protests that it ruined the lines of his dinner jacket. He reached for the suit and froze. The fabric had been cleverly arranged to conceal a box, wrapped in gaudy, shimmery paper adorned with dancing reindeer. They were holding hands with Santa and appeared to be doing the can-can. Scrawled on lovely thick parchment paper was that familiar chicken scratch, Q’s draftsman’s hand turned to the spiky, crabbed near-nonsense he’d cultivated just to piss off the people who processed his paperwork: LOVE FROM YOUR SECRET SANTA.

He’d spent so much time sunk into the image of Q’s eyes lighting up when he received his gift and realised who must have given it, what must have been meant by it, that he hadn’t spared any thought to his own Secret Santa. This was Moneypenny’s doing, he thought in a daze. He should’ve remembered that she was Q’s friend, first. Q, after all, wouldn’t have needed to bribe her with double-oh participation to get the name he wanted.

He peeled back the paper.

A SPY GAME, read the glossy black appliance-sized box staring back at him.

– ♠ –

Q opened his door at 3:14AM on Christmas morning and immediately drew him into a kiss so hot and fierce and perfect Bond almost didn’t feel the prick of Mr. Turner’s claws against his ankle or Mr. Turing’s plaintive yowls at being woken. His pyjamas were classic red-and-white checks, much to Bond’s relief; he had half been expecting Q to sleep in a Santa suit.

 _“James,”_ Q breathed, in a way that speared straight through his heart. “I take it—” he gasped in between kisses, grinning, beautiful, “—you liked—your present, then?”

“Play later,” Bond growled. “Sex now.”

Q laughed like ringing bells and dragged him inside by the Christmas-themed tie with which someone (probably Alec, the bastard) had swapped out his usual spare.

– ♠ –

This was not the best part of Christmas morning:

Waking to kisses trailing down his spine, that lovely hot mouth getting distracted and making a slow circle around the bullet scar on his hip before it continued down, down, a teasing lick to his hole and then slow, playful nudging at his balls until Bond turned over and grabbed at him and rolled Q back into the bed, Q giggling and so very deliciously pleased with himself. Play-biting at him, leaving just the faintest impression of teeth in Q’s shoulder, around his right nipple, his right pectoral— _touching_ that body, that body he’d been dreaming about for so long, that lovely soft skin and the wiry leanness underneath it, feeling Q buck teasingly in his arms as he kissed him, his thigh sliding, aching-perfect, over his cock.

Feeling Q’s shoulders tremble as he rutted against him, hard and getting harder, foreskin pulling back tight, tight, and Q fairly writhing underneath him; tasting that skin, that lovely soft skin, the clean tang of sweat and the slightly chemical blandness of the lube dripping everywhere because he’d rolled over the open bottle. Q’s soft little cries, _ah, ah, Bond, I’ll kill you if you don’t suck me off right now_ , _I can make it look like an accident, you know I can, ah, James, James—_ and leaning down and doing it, sealing his mouth over Q’s cock, feeling the tiny little thrusts he couldn’t control as he held himself down, careful, so careful, gentle licks peeling back that care until he was thrusting in a frenzy; withdrawing, blowing cool air over his slit, smiling as Q screamed at him in mingled lust and fury.

Working Q open slowly around his fingers, mouthing at the crease of thigh and hip, tearing noises out of him, a beautiful bacchanal-song and Bond was lost, lost, so lost, it’d been so long since he’d felt this way, it’d been so long since he’d been this consumed in someone, this consuming. Feeling Q clench down, his sharp knees digging into Bond’s sides, feeling Q moan into his mouth. Kissing him, kissing him, kissing him.

And thrusting into him, and the perfect, shattering bliss of what followed.

And Q mouthing softly at his shoulder, sleepy-sweet, syrupy almost, and drifting off again, a lazy Christmas lie-in, and waking up and finding hot cocoa, the perfect tint of warmth, steaming away on the nightstand. And Q’s laugh, low and confidential, like all the best secrets in the world were his for the unwrapping. And Q’s lingering, soft touches, skating his fingers across his skin and his scars, like he couldn’t believe he was really here when it was Bond who was blessed, Bond who was lucky far beyond his karma, Bond who meant to cling tight and not let go, not for one moment. All of that was lovely, and lovelier still, but it wasn’t the best part of Christmas morning.

This, it turned out, was the best part of Christmas morning:

Q, padding back into the bedroom, his sleep-shirt mostly on but mis-buttoned in places and gaping at the collar to display the love-bites Bond had scattered across his clavicle with loving focus, carrying three boxes: Legacy Affliction, Gaia Magicka, and a glossy black box that Q had laboured so sweetly over for Bond’s sake, the only one of its kind in the world.

“Fancy a game?” he said brightly, and Bond smiled back, and somewhere nearby, a cat yawned and stretched out into the sunlight that had turned white and brittle from the snow on the windowsill.

– ♠ – ♠ – ♠ –

**Author's Note:**

> On the last day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: porn delivered festively.
> 
> All the board games Q and James play are thinly-disguised versions of real games. Camille's collection is based on my own; Q's is not.
> 
> Affliction / [Pandemic](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/30549/pandemic)  
> Saga: Spice World / [Century: Spice Road](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/209685/century-spice-road)  
> Kalico / [Calico](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flatoutgames/calico-0)
> 
> Hardcover / [Hardback](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/223750/hardback)  
> Island of the Spirits / [Spirit Island](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/162886/spirit-island)  
> Moss / [Root](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/237182/root)
> 
> Outland / [Scythe](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/169786/scythe)  
> Ups and Downs / [Above and Below](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/172818/above-and-below)  
> Tropic West / [Western Tropic](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/LenKendall/western-tropic)
> 
> Colonizing Jupiter / [Terraforming Mars](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/167791/terraforming-mars)  
> Unfurl / [Wingspan](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/266192/wingspan)  
> Legacy Affliction / [Pandemic Legacy: Season One](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/161936/pandemic-legacy-season-1)  
> Oxidation / [Photosynthesis](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/218603/photosynthesis)
> 
> Elder Horrors / [Eldritch Horror](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/146021/eldritch-horror)  
> other mentioned games: [Settlers of Catan](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/13/catan), [7 Wonders](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/68448/7-wonders), [Mansions of Madness: Second Edition](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/205059/mansions-madness-second-edition), [Azul](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/230802/azul), [Castles of Burgundy](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/84876/castles-burgundy), [Terra Mystica](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/120677/terra-mystica)
> 
> Chapter Two is named after _Smiley's People,_ one of le Carré's novels about George Smiley, the anti-Bond. A meeple is a game piece that represents the player or the player's people.
> 
> Catch me on [tumblr](https://midrashic.tumblr.com) or on the 00Q slack chat. If you like my work and want to support me, buy me a coffee. 
> 
> I'm also pleased to announce that [christinefromsherwood](https://christinefromsherwood.tumblr.com) and [soufflegirl91](https://soufflegirl91.tumblr.com/) tied up their race to see who could comment first at the last minute, with Christine winning chapters 1, 5, and 6 and Souffle winning 2, 4, and 7! Congratulations both of you!
> 
> My comment policy boils down to one thing: **Please comment.** You. Yes, you in particular. If you would like examples, a simple heart emoji or “+kudos” now that the multiple kudos function has been disabled are hugely appreciated. Your comment does not have to be profound. Your comment does not have to be long. If all you have the energy for is the heart emoji, i appreciate that much more than a kudos or a bookmark. A kudos is not interchangeable with a short comment that says “great job!” or something similar. I always respond to comments. If you feel like your comments mean less than those from people I regularly interact with, you’re wrong; comments mean more from a stranger. I would prefer a “please update” to no comment. I would prefer a short comment to no comment. I would prefer criticism to no comment. Comments keep writers writing and in the fandoms you love. **Please comment.**


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